The entrance fee, along with the profits from carnival rides and drink and cotton candy sales, go back into the event. The majority of the festival’s food booths are run by local charities, nonprofits, and scouting groups and the proceeds raised stay with each organization. Visitors can feel good about the money they spend at Sights & Sounds. Once inside, many of the festival’s activities are included with the price of admission: enjoying the lights, visiting the petting zoo animals, making candles, playing Reindeer Games, and even photos with Santa come at no extra cost. Parking and ADA-accessible shuttles from nearby parking lots to the front gate of Sights & Sounds are also free. Children 12 and under are free, and admission for guests ages 13 and older is only $5 per night or $15 for an eight-day pass. Sights & Sounds strives to make the experience an affordable one, especially for younger visitors. “The arrival of Santa energizes the entire festival, so the focus is on doing something new and different every night.” Photo Courtesy of: Deborah Kavanaghįrom helicopters and fire trucks to river rafts and monster trucks, no form of transport is too ambitious or extravagant for Santa. “Santa Claus is our superhero, and we bring him into the park with the welcome he deserves,” explained Tommy Curtis, president of the Sights & Sounds Board of Directors. Sights & Sounds is particularly well known for its nightly Santa entrances.
Shop the holiday vendor booths in Santa’s Gift Shop, and indulge in festival foods like kettle corn, turkey legs, funnel cakes, cotton candy, hot cocoa, hot cider, and the ever-popular campfire biscuits with butter and honey. Visitors can also journey back in time to the town of Bethlehem, watch live performances by local youth choirs and dance troupes,
After soaring and spinning through the many carnival attractions, visitors can enjoy pony rides, a scavenger hunt, holiday-themed arts and crafts,Ĭandle making, a petting zoo, ice skating, a light show at Santa’s House, the Reindeer Games play area, and photos with Santa. Something for EveryoneĪ wide variety of holiday-themed activities means everyone can find something to love at Sights & Sounds. Many visitors to Sights & Sounds have regularly attended for decades because the event, while larger in scale, continues to welcome them as one would be welcomed into an old friend’s living room. Recognizing that growth, no matter how necessary, is often accompanied or followed by a decrease in community ownership and quality of local events, Sights & Sounds’s leadership worked hard to protect its roots and maintain that small-town festival feel. Because Sights & Sounds is held outside, inclement weather can easily impact whether the event is successful in terms of attendance and fundraising. The event welcomes between 45,000 and 70,000 guests annually, so one weekend simply could not support the substantial crowds. And most recently, after years of spanning just one long weekend, Sights & Sounds expanded to encompass two four-day weekends. The light displays along the San Marcos River have multiplied to include more than 900,000 twinkling bulbs, 90,000 of which light the famous Sights & Sounds tree. As the number of rides, activities, and vendors increased, so did the need for space to accommodate this need, the festival relocated to the more spacious and better equipped City and San Marcos Plaza Parks. Now a 501c3 charity, in the past 30 years Sights & Sounds has grown tremendously. They stepped up to volunteer and lead Sights & Sounds. Residents of San Marcos and the surrounding communities, as well as the students enrolled at San Marcos’s Texas State University, fell in love with the event almost immediately. San Marcos’s Main Street Program had just taken hold, and a holiday-themed festival fit perfectly into the program’s vision to “foster a downtown that is a unique and culturally vibrant destination, where local businesses thrive and people of all ages can connect, create, and celebrate.” A small group of engaged and committed community members gathered on the front lawn of the courthouse to coordinate the simple affair: hayrides through an area of the city already aglow with Christmas lights, visits with Santa, and popcorn, tinsel, arts, and crafts. Sights & Sounds of Christmas began in 1987 in downtown San Marcos, Texas.
When pumpkin-shaped decorations have been packed away, and Thanksgiving leftovers have been devoured, the hills, or rather City Park and downtown San Marcos, come alive with the Sights & Sounds of Christmas.
0 kommentar(er)
