Parks workers relish longstanding tradition with Christmas light displays

By Cameron Montemayor

More than 40 years after the first holiday lights illuminated Krug Park to the awe of St. Joseph residents, the month-long event stands as one of the City’s greatest traditions. 

With the Holiday Park’s biggest rush of the season approaching, staff with the St. Joseph Parks and Recreation Department take great pride in continuing the iconic display that debuted in 1981.  

“This is really the most popular thing that our guys look forward to each year is getting Holiday Park and the South Pole set up,” said Jeff Atkins, assistant director with the Parks, Recreation and Civic Facilities Department. “They get to enjoy it knowing that they’re doing something that the community loves so much.”

A St. Joseph native himself, Atkins is one of many within the department whose family also enjoys and volunteers their time to the longstanding project, which originally took the place of an annual Children’s Christmas Party that was held prior to 1981.

The City and the East Side Optimist Club, a local community service organization, helped create, finance and manage the first Holiday Park that averaged 900 vehicles a night according to St. Joseph News-Press reports. The Club is one of four optimist clubs across the City that still volunteers at the Holiday Park booth handing out Cherry Mashes.  

This year, the Park is expected to see anywhere from 78,000 to 79,000 visitors before it concludes on Jan. 1, more than the population of the entire city.

Parks workers often use a creative way to get a rough estimate of the number of visitors over the course of the season.

“The Cherry Mashes kind of serve a double role for us,” Atkins said. “One, everybody loves to get their free cherry mash, but we use the total number of cases that we go through in a year to kind of guesstimate how many people have come through.”

Atkins said transforming the Park into a “winter wonderland” typically begins in mid-October with smaller crews laying the groundwork until two weeks out, when nearly all of the Park’s 24 maintenance workers are moving throughout the Park. 

The 2024 Holiday Park display comes with several new and improved features, including new reindeer in Elf Village, an all-new Candy Cane Lane Display and a new Snowman that sits above the Krug Park tunnel. 

“They’ve been really popular with the kids … the response has been tremendous. We’re getting a lot of good compliments,” Assistant Director Atkins said. “We’ve got a few new displays and tweaks we’ve made throughout the park that people have noticed.”

All of the displays within the park are fabricated by the department, which heavily utilizes precision printing technology now to create artistic and durable displays, a far cry from the days of creating displays entirely by hand.  

The latest features add to a growing list that includes beloved classic displays like the nativity scenes, Santa’s sleigh with reindeer, the color-changing waterfall and the enchanted forest of animals. 

“That really added a lot more fun and character to that up on top there,” Atkins said. 

Residents and visitors were also treated to a one-of-a-kind experience this past Friday, Dec. 20, with production crews from the film ‘Chrismystery’ using the Park’s bright lights as a scenic backdrop for several scenes in the holiday film. 

“They were here because they had heard of Holiday Park. So that’s kind of a feather in our cap,” Atkins said with a smile. “Even though the lights do look prettier with snow on the ground, the good weather brings out more people.”