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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 1.5 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, said 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?” said Patterson, who’s in his 24th 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 some 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 activities 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 44,000 visitors each year, on average, dating back to 2022. Before that, tickets were sold per car, rather than per person, making prepandemic comparisons difficult. But anecdotally, COVID provided a boost, Patterson said.
“It increased visitation for a few years, for sure,” he said.
During a recent workday, with the show just a few 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 50-acre garden within Wheaton Regional Park.
For the Brookside show, which opened Nov. 21, 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 said 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 team added a group of pink flamingos near a lake in the gardens, Patterson said.
“That was a huge hit,” Patterson said. “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 said prices changed so frequently that staffers had to check repeatedly before making purchases.
“We have price limits on what we can spend, being a government agency,” Patterson said. “So, we had to cut back some on supplies, because we had to pay a tariff. And that — I’d never seen that before. So, instead of buying 20 lights, we were going to buy 18 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 said. Admission is $13.99 Sunday through Thursday and $16.99 on Fridays and Saturdays. Children 5 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, some 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 said.
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 2015, Patterson said.
“It took us quite a few years to get all the forms done, because they were all incandescent,” Patterson said. “You have our giraffe, which has the most 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 said.
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 significant 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 said.
