Bright Nights celebrates a quarter century of spreading holiday spirit

By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com

Bright Nights – that light-filled holiday experience that winds its way through Springfield’s iconic Forest Park – turns 25 this year.

And what an anniversary it is! First off, the display is up for recognition this year in USA Today’s Top 10 Best Readers’ Choice Travel Award contest for being among the “best, brightest and most beautiful holiday light shows put on by neighborhoods, cities and parks” (you can vote for Bright Nights through noon on Dec. 2 at 10Best.com).

That award would be the icing on the anniversary cake, so to speak. Bright Nights is already known as the Northeast’s premier holiday lighting experience, has been named one of the Top 100 Attractions in North America by the American Bus Association seven times, is listed on People.com as “One of the Top Ten Holiday Happenings in America,” and was featured in both The New York Times, and magazines that include Motorhome, Colonial Homes, Yankee and U.S. Airways, as well as on Yahoo.com, according to www.brightnights.org.

Beyond garnering a potential new award at 25, Bright Nights is also  issuing its second commemorative book this season, this one filled not only with pictures and history, but also with the memories of people who have visited the display over the years, many of whom have made it a part of their family holiday tradition for more than one generation.

“[Bright Nights] means a lot to a lot of people,” shared Judy Matt, president of the non-profit Spirit of Springfield, which has co-sponsored the annual show with the Department of Parks, Buildings & Recreation Management from the first season. “It’s very nice to bring memories to so many people.”

This year will offer even more memory-making for visitors, kicking off with a well-loved tradition, Roll Back pricing on opening night, Nov. 27, when all passenger cars will be admitted for the 1995 price of just $6. On Nov. 29, visitors will be treated to an ice sculpture display and demonstration, on Dec. 12 they will have an opportunity to take part in gingerbread house-making and on the weekend of Dec. 20-22, local high school choirs will lend their voices to the music that accompanies Bright Nights. Choirs appearing that weekend include students from Pope Francis Preparatory School performing on Dec. 20, students from the Chicopee High School Choir – who also performed with Foreigner at the Big E this fall – on Dec. 21 and the Westfield Show Choir on Dec. 22. In addition to the rollback price on opening night, there will be one other chance to see the lights at a discounted price, $10 on Dec. 10.

All this is in addition to the carriage and wagon rides that are available through the park, the two supper with Santa nights, numerous craft nights and the chance to stop for a hot chocolate, a trip through the gift shop, a ride on the carousel or train, or a photo with Santa (additional charge) available to the young – and  the young at heart – every evening of the display.

To date more than 6 million visitors have watched the reindeer leap, the skaters skate and the fountain flow – among other dazzling lighting displays – since Forest Park first opened its gates to admit the inaugural Bright Nights visitors on Nov. 24, 1995. It’s a phenomenon, Matt explained to Prime, that started with the arrival of a simple brochure.

An illuminating idea

Matt said Bright Nights started with a call from Patrick Sullivan, director of Parks, Buildings & Recreation Management for the city of Springfield. “A brochure came across his desk [that February], it seemed there were parks, mostly on the east coast, down south, that because [their] park was not being used in the winter months very much in the evening, they decided to start programs like [Bright Nights].” Lighting display companies had picked up on the idea, she continued, and it was an advertisement from one of those companies – Carpenter Decorating – that piqued Sullivan’s interest.

“He asked me if I wanted to work on [this idea] with him because I had done several other projects with him, and that’s how it really started,” Matt recalled.

She said when she and Sullivan subsequently met with “the man who had sent us the brochure,” his concept was to produce a small display that used just the upper part of Forest Park, specifically the area around the baseball fields. “He wanted Santa throwing snowballs, everything was Santa,” Matt said. “My feeling was first time should be as good as any time.”

She and Sullivan called the company directly, looking for more. Their vision, she shared, was to incorporate images highlighting the history of the city with festive, holiday-themed displays.

“They sent up one of their designers, John Catenaci, and John started to set up these art boards, all hand-done – that was before they started computerizing things – he knew how serious we were,” Matt shared, adding “When we did [the first] Bright Nights, we were the largest single order [of displays] they had ever done.”

From the start, Matt said the concept for Bright Nights included many of the displays people have come to love, including Seussland, Noah’s Ark, the Victorian Village, the Leaping Deer, Blizzard Corridor, Toy Land, the Candles and Happy Holidays. “The first year we had the Menorah,” she noted. “And we had the first Kwanzaa [display] in the United States.” Bright Nights has also included a Nativity Scene since that first year, but it was erected a few weeks into the inaugural display. “There was some controversy about having a religious symbol in the [public] park,” Matt said. But after the appropriate hurdles were cleared – and many visitors had called asking why there was no Nativity Scene in Bright Nights – the display went up.

A lot of work

Despite the scope of that first Bright Nights, Matt admitted it wasn’t a project that had the luxury of a year or so of planning. When she and Sullivan moved forward to lay the park groundwork for the displays, it was already fall in that first Bright Nights season. In fact, the press conference announcing the project was on Sept. 7, 1995, according to the Bright Nights 15th anniversary commemorative book.

“This shows how fast we did this. In 1995, because there was no power in the park sufficient to do this display, we started trenching in September to finish in November,” Matt said. “The amount of work [the Park Dept. team] did to get it ready – and because of the historic nature of the park, everything had to be underground.”

Securing funding for this undertaking was almost as much work, Matt said, pointing to a battered artists’ portfolio leaning against the wall in her office.

“The art boards, I schlepped them from place to place to place and people, they trusted us. I’d been working with a lot of these people for a long time, and here we had these art boards, and [I told them the drawings] are going to be in lights, and they trusted me and they believed me,” Matt said. “We had so many good people, but we had to get some significant support – not only financial. Peter Picknelly, who was on my board at the time – he’s now deceased – he was the one who signed the note for us to get the money to do the displays.”

She added that the initial deposit for what would become a $600,000 order of illuminated displays was actually the money Paul Bacon, now retired vice president of Cornerstone Real Estate Advisors, Inc., a subsidiary of MassMutual, which owns Tower Square, had given Matt to order the holiday lights from Carpenter Display that now decorate that building annually.

“He knew that, it’s just how it happened,” she said of that initial year. “This was a wing and a prayer, but we had a lot of people who thought it was a good thing.”

Milton Bradley (which was acquired first by Hasbro, and now, Cartamundi) was an example of a supporter willing to take a chance on Bright Nights, Matt said. “[They] had always been a major sponsor with me on the Pancake Breakfast,” adding that George Ditomassi, who was there at the time, decided to switch his sponsorship from the breakfast to Bright Nights for that year. “I went around to the president of the electric company – ‘he said, whatever everybody else is doing, I’ll do the same’ – he gave me the underground vaults that we have in the park, that was their contribution was getting the electrical things that we needed done.” she said.

“The electrical [work] alone was $200,000,” she said of that initial cost of powering the first Bright Nights. “Of course it’s a couple million in lights, now, and we [still] have every one of those displays, even the first ones, they maintain them so well.”

Matt said the Park Department employees who install and subsequently “touch up” Springfield’s Bright Nights displays postseason  “are the best in the country” at what they do.

“Our Park Department crew is our greatest asset,” she shared, adding that two of the men who install the Bright Nights displays every season have been with her for all of the event’s 25-year history. “It takes 40 to 50 days to set up, and another 40-50 days to take down, depending on the weather and the ground conditions,” Matt explained.

Plus, because of the nature of the weather in New England, Matt said Springfield’s Bright Nights crew has had to figure out how to adapt

displays built by southern-based companies for southern parks to withstand snow and ice – like the record snowfall that blanketed the displays and the park that first Bright Nights season, “We had to close so many days,” Matt recalled – and their innovative procedures have been replicated at other parks across the country over the years.

An ever-evolving tradition

From the first year, Matt said Bright Nights has been growing and expanding the number and kinds of experiences it offers visitors, always trying to keep the event fresh. After the first season they added Barney’s Mansion. Later came the Winter Garden. “After Sept. 11 we added the ‘Garden of Peace,’” Matt said, and “about 10 years ago” when a park in California decided to end their

displays, Bright Nights acquired the dinosaurs that now inhabit its “Jurassic World” display. Over the years she said the Toy Land display has expanded to include classic Milton Bradley and Hasbro games such as “Monopoly” and “The Game of Life.”

“People think you should add something new every year, they don’t know how expensive that is,” Matt joked.

Last season, Matt said Bright Nights added a nod to Springfield’s own AHL hockey team with a Thunderbirds display. “That’s such a popular display because its very, very colorful, people love it,” she noted.  This year, it’s MGM’s lion that joins the 2½ mile trail of lights. The leaping image of the regal big cat “measures 170 feet long,” Matt said of the new display.

And it isn’t just the lights – and the coordinated music on radio station WELF 100.7 FM –  that make Bright Nights an experience families return to season after season. In recent years the event added a gift shop and Santa Stop, where children can take a photo for an additional charge. Child-friendly activities such as a carousel and train ride, hot cocoa and s’mores round out today’s experience. For the grown ups – and families of course  – there’s now also carriage and wagon rides through the illuminated park on select nights.

“Our gift shop has done so well we’ve started a virtual store, say you saw something and you want to purchase it later … or you want to send something to someone, you can [now] do that online,” Matt said.

Then there’s the Season Pass – available for the last three years – which lets the bearer visit Bright Nights as often as they want during its annual run. And the new, free, Loyalty Card, which entitles the bearer to perks, such as free admission on opening night, three free amusement ride tickets to be used during a visit of the bearer’s choice, a $5 admission on Dec. 9, a discount on the new anniversary book on Dec. 19 and a free Bright Nights ornament on Dec. 23 and 24.

In talking with Carpenter Decorating over the past two and a half decades, Matt said she’s learned that there may have been bigger and more elaborate displays than Bright Nights in other parts of the country, but they haven’t survived as long as this one. “Unless you keep marketing it, people do something else, and that’s our greatest strength, to keep marketing it, and now with social media, I must say, we have a broader reach,” she closed.

Follow Bright Nights on facebook at: www.facebook.com/brightnightsatforestpark, on Instagram at: www.instagram.com/brightnightsfp/;on Twitter at twitter.com/brightnightsfp , and on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/user/brightnightsfp