Golden Gate Park’s dazzling holiday light display brings joy to the season

By JANIE HAR
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A new night-time holiday display featuring music, colors and more than a million twinkling lights in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is delighting children and adults.

There are towering peonies and fields of lights on the mile-long ( 1.6-kilometer) illuminated trail at the city’s Botanical Garden. Artists created whimsical water lilies and giant dragonflies, and transformed a Canary Island strawberry tree into a neon tree.

“Some of my favorite comments have been from kids: Just hearing how it makes them feel, and the happiness and joy,” said Sarah Marsh with Gardens of Golden Gate Park, which operates the Botanical Garden.

“And to be honest,” she said, “it’s the expressions on their faces as they see the lights and experience the trail itself.”

The immersive holiday trails, called Lightscape, are in sister gardens in Chicago, Brooklyn and London, but this is San Francisco’s first. Sony Music and production management company Culture Creative, both based in the United Kingdom, work with each location to create a holiday trail that is specific to the garden.

Sellout crowds have flocked to the San Francisco light show, which ends Jan. 4. It has already attracted 100,000 visitors, said Marsh, with some visitors eager to return during the day to see the plants that dazzled them at night.

“What we hope to do is inspire curiosity,” she said.