Behind the Scenes of Bellingrath Gardens’ Magic Christmas in Lights Display

Each holiday season, Bellingrath Gardens and Home in Theodore transforms into a glowing winter wonderland, delighting visitors with more than three million twinkling lights spread throughout the 65-acre estate. But most of the credit for the Magic Christmas in Lights spectacle belongs to a dedicated crew of just four women who spend much of the year planning, building, hanging and repairing the display that draws visitors from across the Gulf Coast.

It is a year-round job. “The busy time starts at the end of August,” said Hayley Zirlott, senior assistant for the Magic Christmas in Lights display. That’s when the crew begins working in earnest, hanging lights around the gardens and coordinating with the maintenance team on the heavier pieces that anchor the estate’s most elaborate scenes.

Melissa Wells, manager and showrunner of Magic Christmas in Lights, said her team of four spends about six weeks alone just pulling lights out of storage at the start of each season. They then start going through all the pieces, fixing them before the November opening — a repair-and-test phase that turns the summer’s quiet storage building into a workshop of strand testing, bulb replacement and structural touch-ups.

The Rhythm of the Off-Season

The calendar behind the display runs counter to what visitors might imagine. While families across the Gulf Coast are digging decorations out of attics in December, the Bellingrath crew is doing the opposite — packing, cataloging and storing the season’s pieces so they can be found intact the following fall. The work never really stops; it simply changes shape with the seasons.

By the time the last holiday visitor leaves the grounds in early January, the crew is already taking down what took months to hang, feeding the cycle that begins again in late August. For a display this size, the months in between are when the real engineering happens: designing new scenes, ordering materials and building the pieces that will debut when November arrives.

Secrets of Smart Holiday Lighting Storage

Wells shared a few tips that home decorators might find useful — starting with a hard truth about store-bought products. There is no such thing as a no-tangle strand, she explained. Every strand of lights will knot if it is stored carelessly, no matter what the packaging promises.

For her crew, the key technique involves wrapping strands around a hand to create a small ball, then storing them neatly in Coca-Cola crates, a practical system that keeps strands organized and easy to deploy the following year. The humble soda crate has become an institutional tool at Bellingrath: stackable, sturdy and sized just right for the hand-wrapped balls that make next season’s installation faster.

Unlike store-bought decorations, every display at Bellingrath is designed and built entirely on the grounds, with meticulous planning of every piece. Placement is carefully measured and rehearsed so each scene is balanced and visually striking — the difference between a display that looks assembled and one that looks composed.

The Switch to LED

The team has also been steadily transitioning to LED lighting technology. The shift from older incandescent bulbs to LEDs has made maintenance far easier, since a single burned-out incandescent bulb can kill an entire strand — a failure mode that once sent crew members hunting for one dead bulb in a string of dozens.

LED strands fail differently and use a fraction of the electricity, which matters at the scale of three million lights running night after night through the holiday season. The transition has been gradual, scene by scene, as older displays are rebuilt and new ones are created with LED strands from the start — a modernization that most visitors notice only as brighter, richer color.

Decorating Tips From the Pros

For anyone looking to brighten up their own home, the Bellingrath team suggests wrapping small trees with two strands of lights each, starting with the male end of the plug at the base and winding tightly upward, then returning in an X formation and securing the bottom with a zip tie. The two-strand method builds depth into the canopy and keeps the glow even from trunk to tip.

For shrubbery and bushes, Zirlott recommends a zigzag approach using a long cane pole with a hook on the end to gently drape lights from top to bottom. The pole technique saves knees and backs — no crawling around hedge rows — and produces the same draped look the crew achieves across the estate’s sculpted grounds.

“Adding lights to shrubbery will also help your home sparkle,” she said, a reminder that the lights closest to the ground do as much for a display’s overall effect as the strands in the trees above them. Layers, in the Bellingrath approach, matter more than sheer volume — though with three million lights, the crew has volume to spare.

A Tradition That Renews Itself

Though the lighting technology has evolved over the years, the wonder of Bellingrath’s Magic Christmas in Lights has remained constant since the decades-old tradition began. Each year brings a new display design, giving returning visitors something fresh to discover even as the scenes they remember from childhood visits reappear along the garden paths.

The Theodore attraction, drawing visitors from across the Gulf Coast and beyond, remains one of the region’s most treasured holiday traditions — a nightly walk through scenes that four women spent the better part of a year designing, building, hanging and perfecting.

The Gardens Behind the Lights

The display’s setting is as much a part of its appeal as the lights themselves. Bellingrath Gardens and Home stretches across 65 acres along the Fowl River in Theodore, south of Mobile, with camellias, azaleas, roses and a bayou boardwalk that give the estate year-round drawing power. During the holiday season, those same paths and plantings become the framework for the light scenes, with displays woven into the landscape rather than simply set on the lawn.

That integration is why the crew’s work is so site-specific. Every strand is hung with the particular tree, bridge or garden room in mind, and the pieces built on the grounds are made to fit features no off-the-shelf decoration could match. Visitors walking the route see a display that could exist only on that property — the product of a crew that knows every bend in every path.

The Estate’s Long History

Bellingrath Gardens traces its roots to the early 1930s, when Walter and Bessie Bellingrath opened their country estate’s gardens to the public, beginning a tradition of hospitality that has continued through nine decades on the Alabama Gulf Coast. The home and gardens have grown into one of the region’s best-known attractions, drawing garden enthusiasts in the spring azalea season and holiday travelers each winter.

Magic Christmas in Lights carries that legacy forward each November and December, when the estate’s evening hours turn the gardens into one of the largest holiday light displays on the Gulf Coast. For many families in Mobile County and along the coast, a visit has become an annual ritual — one that the four-woman crew behind the scenes works all year to keep fresh.

Four Women, Three Million Lights

The scale of the operation, set against the size of the crew, is the detail visitors most often find astonishing. Three million lights, hundreds of display pieces, dozens of scenes — all designed, built, installed, maintained and stored by a team small enough to fit in one vehicle, backed by the estate’s maintenance staff for the heaviest lifts.

From the end of August through the November opening, the crew’s days are measured in strands tested, crates filled and scenes assembled. By the time the first ticket-holders step through the gates, the months of work disappear behind the glow — exactly as the team intends. The magic, as the display’s name promises, is real to the visitor; the work behind it belongs to Zirlott, Wells and the two colleagues who make the Gulf Coast’s brightest tradition happen every year.

Planning the Season’s New Scenes

The design work that shapes each year’s display happens months before a single strand is hung. Because every scene is built on the grounds, the crew plans each new piece against the estate’s actual landscape — measuring walkways, sketching sightlines and deciding which view of the gardens each night’s route will showcase. New scenes are introduced every season, which means the design calendar never rests: pieces for next year take shape while this year’s lights are still glowing.

Rehearsed placement is part of the craft, too. The team measures and tests each scene’s arrangement before opening night, adjusting spacing and angles so that the finished tableau reads cleanly from the path. Visitors see the result as effortless; the crew sees the hours of trial and error that got each piece exactly where it belongs.

Lessons From a Professional Crew

Home decorators who adopt the Bellingrath habits — wrapping strands into hand-sized balls, storing them in stackable crates, testing every strand before it goes up, layering lights from shrubs to tree canopies — will find the January take-down nearly as painless as the November installation. The crew’s methods were built for a display three orders of magnitude larger than a front yard, but they scale down without changing.

The deeper lesson is the one that shows in the finished product: a great display is planned, not improvised. Every glow along the Bellingrath route exists because someone decided it should, measured where it would go, and checked that it worked before the crowds arrived — a standard any home display can aim for, one Coca-Cola crate at a time.