If you’re one of the lucky ten thousand today who still haven’t tried programming electronics with the Arduino platform, this detailed guide by [Dafna Mordechai] should hopefully give you enough incentive to pick it up now and make a simple bit of Christmas-themed decoration with it.

The guide isn’t exactly aimed at complete ground-up beginners but it does give some pointers on where to look up whatever information you don’t have in order to follow along. Other than that, it’s very simple and has well-detailed steps, showing you how to turn a breadboard into a simple animated arrangement of LEDs in the shape of a Christmas tree, along with a piezo buzzer playing “Jingle Bells”. If you’ve never done this sort of stuff before, [Dafna] explains in pretty good detail which part of the code does what, making it pretty simple if you want to play around with it and customize it to your taste.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of the basics of Arduino, why not try a project that’s a little more elaborate? Without having to stray too far from your comfort zone, you can easily build a kid’s toy full of switches and lights or even a very extra clock that has no shortage of lights and dials.