Taking #HamForTheHolidays to the next level ?! ?: @AMerryMeridian pic.twitter.com/A7f3ryUlbP
— Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) December 8, 2020
SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah, Dec. 15, 2020 (Gephardt Daily) — Broadway may be dark, but “Hamilton” is up in lights on one Saratoga Springs yard.
Mitch and Shenan Faas and their children have set up their house as a high-tech Christmas light show, set to assorted music, and recorded as individual videos. And songs from “Hamilton” are some of their most popular selections on the Internet. The whole project serves as a fundraiser for Sub For Santa. Donation links run with the videos.
And it’s not just casual browsers who have noticed. “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has checked out his show’s video.
“Ok, so here is the story,” says a statement the Faas family posted on the project page, A Very Merry Meridian. “The last two days have been crazy with the ‘Hamilton’ video we posted.
“Don’t know the true definition of going viral but it’s been two days and our video already has over 300,000 views and nearly 5,000 shares so I think we are low-key getting there. Pretty crazy, right? Our minds have been blown of how many people are enjoying it!
“So I got a message yesterday on FB from someone saying Lin-Manuel’s dad saw our video on Twitter, loved it, and was trying to get ahold of us. His dad retweets our video and tags Lin in his post so we thought “oh he has to see it now”, but we still had no idea if Lin had seen it himself.
“An hour goes by and all of a sudden I hear the ‘ching ching’ notification sound from Venmo on my phone. I look down at my phone and yell to my wife ‘Well I think he saw it!!’ Guys, Lin donated $1,000 to our charity Sub for Santa and sent the below message: “Incredible display, Happy Holidays! Siempre LMM. How cool is that!?!?!?”
The Faases had set their annual fundraising goal at $1,000.
“With this donation we already shattered our goal of raising $1,000, but why stop there? 2020 has sucked for lots of people so we are very excited we can be a small part of helping families out this year.
“If you want to be like LMM, the link to donate is uwayuc.org/meridian, Venmo is https://venmo.com/averymerrymeridian, we have a lit up mailbox onsite for cash or you can text Meridian20 to 71777. We look forward to sharing with you all how many families and children we can sponsor this season!”
But the recognition and support wasn’t over. The family posted again three days later, on Dec. 9.
