This weekend we are planning a trip to our local botanical garden to check out their holiday light show. It’s a Christmastime tradition in our family and my daughter can’t wait to climb on the horse drawn wagon again this year and take in the high-wattage spectacle.
Each year the Green Bay Botanical Garden hosts a Festival of Lights. Even when it’s well below zero hearty Wisconsinites stroll the gardens to see more than 200,000 lights made to look like flowers, butterflies and babbling brooks. This year we are looking forward to seeing the new additions, including a giant dragon luminary and a watering can that appears to be pouring colorful liquids on objects below. The Festival also includes an indoor toy railroad show, which my daughter also loves.
Our local garden’s show is not unlike many others being hosted around the country this time of year. For example, in Colorado the Denver Botanic Gardens is currently presenting its Blossoms of Light. The event features 23 acres of colorful magic with more than 1 million blinking lights. Flora is aflame with wonderful wattage — everything from a forest of trees in autumnal hues to electric green lily pads floating atop a frozen pond. The park also offers visitors special 3-D glasses that festival organizers say, “make the experience akin to walking inside a sparkling snow globe.
In Austin, Texas, hundreds of thousands of visitors and residents turn out for the city’s annual Trail of Lights, which features more than 1.5 million strands of lights in a mile-long display of 43 lighted scenes. The display also includes the Zilker Tree, which is billed as “The World’s Tallest Man-Made Christmas Tree.” In typical Texas style the grand evergreen stands 165 feet tall and is built around one of Austin’s early streetlights.
Travelers to Newport Beach, California look to the water to get their holiday light fix. Newport’s annual Christmas Boat Parade began in 1907 when a relocated Italian gondolier took visitors on a ride across Balboa Bay in a gondola decorated with Japanese lanterns. These days, the five-night, 14-mile parade attracts more than 1 million visitors and more than 100 vessels, including luxury yachts decked out in $50,000 worth of lights.
You might have a Candy Cane Lane in your neck of the woods (we have one in the northern part of our state), but it probably doesn’t compare to what people in Seattle, Washington see at theirs. Legend has it that after two years in a World War II internment camp, Japanese immigrant Tatsuya Kawabata returned to Seattle and showed his forgiving spirit by creating a lighted Christmas card in his front yard. By the 1950s, that spirit had spread, and each yard in his cul-de-sac decked their lawns with homemade stovepipe candy canes. By the 1960s, the 24 houses along “Candy Cane Lane” had signs reading “peace” in different languages and the traditional continues today with the signs and a few hundred thousand other lights.
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