enton’s
own Holiday Lighting Festival—a galaxy of holiday celebration,
sentiment, and community spirit—always feels like it arrives just in
time. What began in 1981 as The Victorian Celebration—volunteers
bedecking downtown’s 1896 Courthouse with wreaths and bows, and a
couple of hundred onlookers gathering to mark the occasion—has swelled
to an entire weekend full of events that last year, according to city
estimates, attracted 10,000 participants.
“The Square was in
the doldrums and there wasn’t much business traffic,” says festival
co-chairman Bob Moses of the event’s origin 25 years ago. “The mayor
and the then-publisher of the
Denton Record-Chronicle got together and said, ‘What can we do to help the downtown merchants?’”
Rechristened
the Denton Holiday Lighting Festival a few years later, the celebration
has board members—many of them civic and business leaders—who spend 11
months each year planning what will be unveiled on November 30. An
all-volunteer team helps execute that vision. And again in 2006,
WFAA-TV Channel 8 will be broadcasting live segments the evening of
November 30 during the festival. A North Texas broadcasting
institution, Troy Dungan, uses the festival as a site for collecting
gifts for his annual Santa’s Helpers Toy Drive to benefit
underprivileged kids. (Remember, bring a new, unwrapped toy for Troy
this year if you can.)
Also returning are Denton’s Grammy
winners Brave Combo, polka and world-music pioneers, for a live
performance. “We book them for an hour, and they usually wind up
playing about 90 minutes,” Moses says. If they’re taking requests that
evening, make sure the boys don’t get away without playing their
ultra-funky classic “Coal and Switches” from the
Holidays album.
And
of course, all the Holiday Lighting Festival’s bedrock ceremonies and
performances will be there, including outdoor stages with choirs, bell
ringers, dancers, and a live Nativity scene. Santa will also be around
to hear the kids’ wish lists. Horse-drawn wagons carry merrymakers
around the Courthouse Square, while trolleys provide tours through the
nearby historic district. And if you’ve ever wondered what those carols
were referring to when they mentioned wassails, you’ll get a chance to
taste different versions at the sixth annual Wassail Fest. It’s a
competition among downtown merchants to see who can concoct the
yummiest variation on this homemade Norse cider. (The word “wassail,”
by the way, means “be in good health.”) We hear the competition gets
pretty heated, with recipes guarded as zealously as state secrets.
The
highlight of the festival is, of course, the annual lighting of the
community Christmas tree. The winner of the city’s yearly Christmas
Tree Coloring Contest will flip the switch that turns on more than
16,000 bulbs on the tree and along the Square. That’s the moment, for
many Dentonites and visitors, when the community truly comes together
as one in the spirit of the holidays. And we realize a part of us has
been waiting all year for this glorious moment.
By Jimmy Fowler