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Thirty years is a long time, y’all! From 1995 to today in 2025, Bellingrath Gardens & Home (BGH) has been celebrating the Christmas and Holiday season through lights and beauty. From our humble origins in 1995 with several exhibits that are no longer used – although some still exist in our boneyard – to today with color-changing LED light technology and CNC plasma-cut metal sculptures, we have come a long way! The through line over these three decades is one of creativity, artistic expression, technological advancements, hard work, organizational “oomph,” and a celebration of families, couples, and the Holiday spirit. We thank you all for forming multi-generational bonds with Bellingrath Gardens & Home through 30 years of Magic Christmas in Lights.
Some of you may have paused when reading the words “CNC plasma-cut metal sculptures” above. Some of you might even have thought, “Say, what?!” Well, that may be due to the fact that we’ve never used this technology before in creating any exhibit for Magic Christmas in Lights (MCIL). However, we’ve known since 2022 that we’ve wanted to reach this point in the evolution of our displays. As such we are debuting four new metal lanterns in this year’s show. These lanterns were intricately cut using a CNC plasma cutting machine, a technology that allows us to transform a conceptual sketch drawing on paper into actual-sized set pieces that are, in this case, made of metal. To come see this scene at MCIL, you’ll have to go to the Secret Garden and look for the four metal lanterns. In future years, you’ll be seeing much more of this kind of technological application at MCIL. We are now several years into the implementation of our Magic Christmas in Lights Master Plan, and all I can say is that “you ain’t seen nothing’ yet!”
And on the note of the 2025 Magic Christmas in Lights, I want to thank all of our sponsors for this year: Hargrove (Mobile), CrowderGulf (Mobile), BlueCross BlueShield of Alabama (Birmingham), and Chris Francis Tree Care (Daphne). Sponsorships are vital to our continued success as an organization, and Bellingrath Gardens & Home cannot thank enough these four sponsors of the 2025 Magic Christmas in Lights. If you or your company is interested in being a sponsor for any of our year-round events, please contact Dr. Cory Sparks, BGH’s Director of Development.
Finally, in closing out this column, the last one of the 2025 year, I am thrilled to be able to announce that Bellingrath Gardens & Home has just successfully completed the process of raising $100,000 in funds that are being doubled by The Daniel Foundation of Alabama! This record-setting grant from the Daniel Foundation truly saw Bellingrath Gardens & Home expand our reach with our Development program. Through extensive work by Cory, me, the Board, and several other staff, we were able to talk with many people about how they could help BGH move forward, and to their credit, we have reached this incredible milestone. A proper thank you to these individuals will be forthcoming. With the completion of this match, of which all of the funds are being used to propel the design work for Phase 1 of the Master Plan, Bellingrath is moving forward faster than ever. THANK YOU to all and everyone who has helped us reach this point.