Anderson Christmas Lights Celebrates Good Season While Preparing for 2026
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The lights are dark now on the hills off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the arches and angels stacked in quiet rows, the music silenced until another Thanksgiving.
Yet for the people who run Anderson Christmas Lights, the season is both a memory and a ledger still open on the table—a balance of kilowatts and canned cocoa, interns and incandescents, visitors who came for an evening’s holiday celebration and left, they hope, with something like wonder lodged behind the eyes.
In its thirty-second year, Anderson Christmas Lights—still colloquially “Anderson Lights of Hope” to many locals—did not break records, at least not in the way nonprofit directors are often trained to crave. The numbers were, as the organizer puts it, “average,” a season that settled squarely in the middle when set against three decades of attendance and revenue.
Around 25,000 people drove or walked beneath the displays this year, roughly 61 percent of them who live outside of Anderson County, making the holiday park both a regional pilgrimage as a neighborhood tradition.
“Average,” in this context, is not a pejorative but a kind of relief. The economy, by organizer Ben Phillips, executive director of Anderson Christmas Lights own acknowledgment, is not “perfect in this world right now,” and his team adjusted early, trimming and planning so that the lights could still come down “in the black, as everybody says.”
If there is a quiet satisfaction in that phrase, it is because survival itself has become an accomplishment for seasonal institutions that depend as heavily as this one does on sponsors and volunteer labor. The displays do not simply appear: they are purchased at a fraction of their usual cost nearly a year in advance, when prices are low and freight routes less congested, then assembled each fall into the nightly spectacle that locals have come to assume will re-materialize as reliably as the first cold snap.
The arithmetic of enchantment here is simple and extravagant. It takes 32 days to raise the show from its crates each year, but only six or seven days to bring it down—if, and only if, there is enough manpower. The smallest illuminated sheep on the grounds runs about $700, and the larger, more elaborate pieces climb quickly into the thousands; each year, three or four new displays are added, purchased by sponsors whose names glow on signs almost as brightly as the figures themselves. This season, new sponsors came in to underwrite fresh scenes, their contributions embedded in the landscape of wireframes and LEDs that now stretch, almost seamlessly, across the property Anderson County has provided for nearly a decade.
The village, a cluster of buildings with vendors and performers inside the larger circuit, has become the emotional center of the event—a place where the lights are close enough to touch and where commerce, charity, and community blur. This year, that village saw more tenants than ever before, a fuller little town inside the temporary town. Part of the credit, the organizer insists, belongs to a pair of Clemson University interns whose social-media fluency helped reframe the old-fashioned drive-through spectacle for a feed-scrolling audience.
“I ‘blame’ the interns for our great turnout,” said Phillips, in a kind of amused gratitude; in their posts and stories, the interns translated string lights into shareable content, pulling in visitors who might previously have assumed the event was for someone else.
If Anderson Christmas Lights is a story of adaptation, it is also a story of erosion—specifically, of the fading culture of unpaid labor that once underpinned so many civic projects. Over the years, the pool of volunteers has grown smaller, and not just here.
“Every organization in Anderson County will say, ‘we are all struggling,’” said Phillips. In schools, community-service requirements now come with opt-outs: bring canned goods, pay a fee, and the expectation to show up in person dissolves.
“That doesn’t show community,” said Phillips. “You’ve got to support your community. You’ve got to come in and you’ve got to volunteer.” This year, two organizations had to withdraw from participating because they could not muster enough people to staff their shifts at the park, a loss felt not only in logistics but in the texture of the event itself.
The work, when it is done, is not glamorous. Beyond the nightly ritual of Santa and hot chocolate is an off-season defined by painting, building, repairing—tasks that begin as soon as the last car leaves the park and continue through the heat of summer, often with the same small corps of regulars. The organizers are already scouting local crafters who must begin four to six months before Christmas to have goods ready for the village, adding another layer of long-haul planning to a project that many visitors encounter as an impulse drive on a December night.
Sponsorships, too, must be secured early, because it takes four to six months for new displays—ordered from Bronner’s, the Michigan purveyor of year-round Christmas—to be manufactured and shipped south.
For all this, the event remains stubbornly forward-looking. Planning runs a year and a quarter ahead, so that by the time a season’s first visitors arrive, the next year is already sketched out in emails and invoices. The coming season, for example, will greet drivers with a brand-new archway at the entrance, its pieces shipped in from Canada and arriving, almost teasingly, in mid-December, too late to debut but early enough to sit in wait like a promise. Toyland, one of the signature zones, is scheduled for a new look, and crews will replace 122,000 incandescent bulbs with LEDs, pushing the park to roughly eighty-two percent LED and nudging the one-month power bill down to around $7,500.
These numbers, too, are a kind of theology. To run an outdoor Christmas attraction is to negotiate constantly between transcendence and the power company. The organizer talks about the electric lines and the sanitation trucks with the gratitude reserved for Santa himself. Anderson County’s sanitation crews come to deal with the surprisingly voluminous trash generated by hot chocolate debris alone; grounds workers help keep the property usable for both the lights and the county’s other big-ticket events, such as the upcoming “Rock the Country” festival. County employees, unseen by most visitors, are thanked by name if not individually, their labor folded into the magical thinking that allows a seasonal village to seem inevitable.
The ecosystem around the lights has its own economy. Charities are invited to work the front gate, earning money and a platform for their missions in exchange for braving the cold and the traffic. Vendors—local crafters by design—sell the small, handmade objects that coexist uneasily but persistently with the mass-produced figures ordered from the Midwest. And presiding over it all, in the popular imagination and in the nightly lines, is Santa, who this year is estimated to have seen more than 62,000 children, a figure that suggests that many families came not just once but repeatedly, or that children, unlike displays, do not obey the limits of per-car counts.
The story of Anderson Christmas Lights is, finally, about repetition and accretion: the way a place changes when a ritual insists on returning to it. When the event first moved to its present site nearly 10 years ago, the organizer recalls, there were two buildings and a tent for Santa; now, the old man in red has a “nice little house,” and the grounds around him have filled in with structures, pathways, and routines that make the season feel, at least for a month, like a self-contained town. In January, as county crews clear lines and volunteers consider whether they have another year of painting in them, the park reverts to something more prosaic, a stretch of land awaiting its next assignment.
But those who keep the spreadsheets and order the elf-shaped lights are already living 10 months in the future, in the moment when the newly lit archway will blink on for the first time and a car at the back of the line—maybe from Abbeville, maybe from North Carolina—will ease forward under it. The visitors will not think about Michigan manufacturers or Canadian freight; they will not know that somewhere, an organizer is silently clocking whether this year’s attendance is above or below the 32-year average. They will only see a wash of color in the dark and, for a brief interval, allow themselves to believe that the lights, like the season they symbolize, arrive effortlessly on cue.
