When I decided to do a promotional video for Electric Jesus, I wanted to wait until the Christmas season to get footage of yards decorated with blow molded nativity scenes. I also decided I might like to purchase my own Electric Jesus to feature in the video. Jackson, Tennessee has a lot of shopping options so I thought would be able to easily find a nativity scene. This wasn’t as easy as I thought. Many retailers don’t carry any of these items anymore because I guess they don’t sell as many. I saw some on-line but I didn’t want to wait for them to ship. I decided to make a road trip to Memphis with my family to see what we could find there. We found a store there that had cartons and cartons of Electric Jesus. They didn’t have as many of the other pieces of the nativity scene. We took video of this shopping trip that we used for the early part of the video.
My family had a lot of fun shooting this video. Some of the footage was taken at night around our neighborhood. The house that had the nativity scene that was the inspiration for the song no longer puts out a nativity scene. I don’t know if those people moved or just decided to retire their set. It could be that they wanted to replace it and couldn’t find anything in Jackson. My son was sent out to take close-ups of most of the decorations. He would walk through these people’s yards in the dark. They seemed to show up better when he was closer. Most of the styles of the Electric Jesus were similar or identical to the one I bought in Memphis. They were usually the baby and manger all molded into one piece. We were relatively satisfied with the footage that we had gotten but I decided to scout some more locations on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I went with my youngest daughter to a neighborhood where one of her friend’s lives. There we found a nativity scene with the Electric Jesus lying on a milk crate instead of a manger. You can see this at about the 1:20 mark in the video. This was my favorite shot in the video and made it worth the trip. I feel like the condition of that nativity scene is in better shape that the one I describe in the song but most closely resembles it.