‘A huge undertaking’: Behind the scenes of a Maryland holiday lights show

The holiday light show at Montgomery County s Brookside Gardens is open for about a month and a half But preparing for the show which involves million twinkling lights is pretty much a year-round affair Practically right after each year s show finishes in early January staff members are already thinking about the next iteration of the popular event noted Jeff Patterson the facilities and grounds manager at the garden We ll have a wrap-up meeting and then it s What do you want to do for next year disclosed Patterson who s in his th year setting up the show Brookside Gardens is not alone Throughout the state drive-through and walk-through light shows have become winter holiday mainstays that require hundreds of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up every year In Maryland popular shows take over parks gardens fairgrounds and farmland beginning various time around Thanksgiving and extending past Christmas and often into the New Year The coronavirus pandemic reportedly boosted the concept s popularity with stir-crazy quarantined Marylanders eager for outdoor programs that allowed for social distancing The Garden of Lights show at Brookside which is set up by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission has drawn visitors each year on average dating back to Before that tickets were sold per car rather than per person making prepandemic comparisons laborious But anecdotally COVID provided a boost Patterson disclosed It increased visitation for a limited years for sure he stated During a current workday with the show just a minimal weeks away workers used zip ties to affix lights to a large tunnel decorated to look like a caterpillar that visitors will walk through near the visitor center A second crew assembled another tunnel of lights in the yew garden on the other side of the -acre garden within Wheaton Regional Park For the Brookside show which opened Nov the design work begins in January after which materials are ordered and then an in-house welder assembles the metal structures the hold the lights Patterson noted the crew makes slight modifications to the show each year largely adding more and more attractions based on what set-ups are popular with attendees Last year the crew added a group of pink flamingos near a lake in the gardens Patterson noted That was a huge hit Patterson revealed So this year we added palm trees and a whole bunch of other stuff out there Producing this year s show included a bit of a wrinkle Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump R on goods entering the U S from China and other nations drove up prices on the raw materials and light bulbs that have to be purchased for the displays in the early part of the year Patterson explained prices changed so frequently that staffers had to check repeatedly before making purchases We have price limits on what we can spend being a executive agency Patterson announced So we had to cut back several on supplies because we had to pay a tariff And that I d never seen that before So instead of buying lights we were going to buy lights because we had to pay that extra money in tariffs The show s overall budget is in the hundreds of thousands each year Patterson announced Admission is Sunday through Thursday and on Fridays and Saturdays Children and under are free At Brookside a crew of about a dozen seasonal workers begins assembling the displays in August first putting together the metal silhouettes for the lights and then shortly thereafter pulling the lights from four shipping containers where they are organized by color During the off-season chosen of the larger metal forms are stored beneath tall roof structures including a giraffe and tall trees It keeps adding and adding as the show keeps growing he announced The show has also changed over the years First came the transition to LED lights from incandescent bulbs a time-intensive process that took place around Patterson explained It took us quite a limited years to get all the forms done because they were all incandescent Patterson stated You have our giraffe which has the preponderance lights on it that took three weeks to strip and redo The next big thing is displays that are controlled through cellphone apps which spurred another transition for the staff at Brookside That was a struggle at first the learning curve of Oh we have to get WiFi in the garden now to run all these things Patterson stated The light show is hardly Patterson s only job As grounds manager he also oversees irrigation custodial crews and more But it has become a key part of his day-to-day It s a huge undertaking and it takes almost every section here to make it work from advertising to budgeting to all of our banners and signage we have to put up and online ads Patterson reported Source