With spring in the air and the azaleas in bloom, it may be difficult to cast your memories back to the cold winter months and the high holiday season. While your wreaths, Festivus Poles, menorahs and eight-foot fiberglass trees have long since been stashed away, the folks at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet have just recently finished their holiday cleanup, by dismantling, cleaning and carefully packing up the last remnants of their annual seasonal display known as Nights of a Thousand Candles.

Brookgreen Gardens’ first public nighttime display in 1999 featured a few hundred hand-lit candles and a few hundred strings of lights hanging throughout the sculpture garden. It drew around 1,300 visitors and was called the Luminaria Celebration. People enjoyed it, so they continued it the next year a bit bigger and better, renaming it Nights of a Thousand Candles (NOTC). 

While that first celebration some 26 years ago drew a respectable crowd, the event has grown to a record-breaking nearly 107,000 annual attendees, as were welcomed in the most recent celebration, Nov 30, 2024, – Jan 5, 2025. As has been true for many years, NOTC is Brookgreen’s single largest annual fundraiser, contributing to the nonprofit’s mission to remain a cultural and educational center, and to collect, conserve and exhibit fine American sculpture within a beautiful garden setting. Brookgreen is also an accredited zoo, recognized by the AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Many have seen the numbers behind the NOTC spectacle; starting with some 3,000 hand-lit candles, the first of which greet visitors along the roadside as they drive in. You’ll see them gently flickering, reflected in floating in pools, ponds and lakes, and seemingly floating in mid-air throughout the gardens. The candles are accompanied by literally millions of individual warm white Christmas lights that hang in shimmering waves from nearly every tree, including centuries-old Live Oaks accenting the Spanish moss; the ancient and electrified in happy harmony. Larger multicolored lights are featured dramatically throughout the gardens and especially during the daily Christmas tree lighting of an 80-foot China Fir that was (this last year) taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City. There’s a cranberry bog with some 530 pounds of floating cranberries, dozens of specialty lighting displays and a team of staffers directing an army of volunteers to make it all happen. 

The event has become a beloved holiday tradition that’s been featured in multiple national publications including U.S.A. Today, Southern Living, and NBC’s Today Show, among many others, ranking as one of the most visited and highly rated holiday attractions in the U.S. 

We know it takes months to install NOTC every year, starting each year around Labor Day, but we speculated that dismantling the massive show might be a task just as herculean. What’s it really like to put it all away?

I was able to spend a few days with Jon McGann, director of public displays, and watch as he and his staff and volunteers tackled the job, never far from the thought that 2025’s NOTC preparations are looming just around the corner.

9 a.m.
“I like to say ‘next year’s show starts today,’” said McGann, a transplanted Pennsylvanian who’s been at Brookgreen for some 17 years. His ingenious techniques, born out of necessity and a drive for efficiency, have led to some remarkable innovations in holiday lighting.

He has oft repeated that NOTC, in one stage or another, is part of his daily job about nine months out of each year. 

We met on a cool, breezy morning at the west end of Brookgreen’s famed Oak Allee, still displaying sheets of light hanging from moss-draped live oaks. Here alone some 1,600 strands, each with 10 individual bulbs, make 160,000 lights in total that hang in recumbent glory. An upcoming wedding party negotiated a late take-down of the most famous of all the NOTC displays.

9:15 a.m.
We walk together from the Oak Allee to the nearby Dogwood Pond and discuss McGann’s important role at the gardens.

“My group is responsible for Nights of a Thousand Candles, Summer Lights, a number of smaller events, set-up for parties, lectures and educational series, it’s a lot,” says McGann, nearly tall as a Christmas tree, but measured, soft-spoken and highly focused.

“We start getting ready for Nights in the mid-summer,” he adds, “but how we put it all away now determines how hard we work putting it back up.”

A crew has been at work since 6:30 a.m. and McGann and I meet them lakeside where nine floating Christmas trees must be corralled and brought to shore in preparation for their dismantling and storage.

The floating electrified 8-foot trees, sitting on hidden rafts in the middle of the pond, make not only a spectacular nighttime image, but forethought in their design makes for easy retrieval with ropes. No boats required.

“They held up well,” remarks McGann, “considering the wind we had.” Just a day earlier high winds with gusts up to 35 MPH didn’t phase the displays or loosen them from their moorings. “The first incarnation of this plan did not go well,” he mused. “They kept falling over, but we attached them to each other, which gave them a lot more stability.”

With a heave-ho and some extra elbow grease the trees are brought to shore. Crates already marked with the display’s identifiers are moved into place via forklifts and their storage process is underway. Radios crackle as the Brookgreen staff communicate with one another throughout the 9,700-acre campus. We commandeer a mule, a glorified golf-cart-mini-pickup-truck to check in at McGann’s office, shop and storage area.

10:05 a.m.
Few outsiders ever see the hidden parts of Brookgreen, except for glimpses through the trees, but like any large operation, it’s designed that way. McGann shows me his no-nonsense office, which looks as much like a shop and repair facility as you might expect. It’s filled with crates, waders the volunteers use to light candles in the ponds, harnesses for the tree work, and more accoutrements that one might imagine. It’s surrounded by storage trailers that hold most of the NOTC lights from one year to the next. I’m shown a volunteer-made device, a mini candle guillotine, that trims partially burned candles, readying them for the next use and the next year, wasting nothing.

Lessons learned come large and small.

“If a candle gets wet it’s done for a full year,” says McGann, and with all the candles open and exposed to the elements, he’s learned to keep thousands in stock to replace them at a moment’s notice, should it rain. “If the wick gets wet, it takes a year for it to dry out enough to burn properly. If one gets wet, I’ll mark it, put it away and in May or June I’ll test it, it will sizzle and go out, won’t stay lit.” They don’t throw them out, but they go into dry storage to fully recuperate and be reintroduced as working stock the following season. “All the burnt candles from this year will be sorted, cut and put away for next year.”

Coils of Christmas lights, the very same kind bought by millions around the world, are beginning to stack up and find their way into the shop.

“When the lights get old, discolored or quit working altogether, we do have to replace them,” says McGann. “We lose about 10-20 percent of our mini lights each season.” The Pawleys Island Ace Hardware has been the Christmas light and extension cord purveyor of choice for many years.

“We’re working behind the scenes in August, digging everything back out, fixing, replacing, refurbishing. We don’t have time to build, clean and repair stuff once we start the installations. Everything has to be ready to go by Labor Day. Any new ideas or new installations we have start by the middle of the summer.”

Logistics and organization are key components of the job and something at which McGann excels, but it’s more than just the nuts and bolts of setting it up and tearing it down. Creativity is an all-important element.

“Part of my job is to understand the event and the [Brookgreen] style, to know our standards,” he said. “We try to respect the past but also try to add something new every year. It keeps our job interesting and fun. We need to keep it fresh.”

10:27 a.m.
In the grand scale of things, few displays can match the 80-foot China Fir Holiday tree, the highlight, some say, of each evening when the crowd counts down from 10 and the tree is lit. Kids shake jingle bells and grab at mini candy canes singing a few holiday classics while they’re at it. Now with last year’s event a memory, all the fun, candy and music are gone, leaving the tree ready to shed its oh-so-impressive lights.

“Before the event opens, we test [the installation], of course, and it’s wonderful to see,” says McGann, “but to see this field full of people and see and hear their reaction when it’s lit, is really gratifying.”

After all the gratification, and when the show is over, then comes the laborious task of dismantling. It takes most of his staff and just as many volunteers a few full days, 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., to remove and store this one tree’s lights.

There are 7,600-feet of Christmas lights in the form of 76 100-foot strands covering the fir. Some of the staff are already manning the giant cherry picker and smaller lifts to continue the un-stringing that they’ve been at for hours.

The star comes down first and the work goes from the top down. If you’ve ever tried to remove a string of lights from your own eight-foot live Christmas tree, come January, you know how hard it can be. Imagine a tree a hundred times the size with a hundred times the number of lights.

11:01 a.m.
The entire process takes staff and volunteers the better part of two months, ensuring that Brookgreen Gardens is ready for the rush of springtime visitors, and just before the Summer Lights events begin. 

Construction continues on the Purdy Center, a new conservatory and welcome center, a bucket-list item from a 30-year-old master plan. Featuring rotating tropical gardens, a new butterfly pavilion, an orchard wall, and a design that’s in keeping with Brookgreen’s existing Moorish sensibilities and inspired by 1930’s design elements. The Purdy Center is scheduled to open in late 2025 to Spring 2026.

Renowned glass artist Craig Mitchell Smith will be featured beginning June 4, 2025, with 30 original glass sculptures throughout Brookgreen. McGann will be the lighting designer for this installation and has already held several meetings with the artist.

Brookgreen Gardens opened to the public in 1931, which means its centennial anniversary is in six years. I asked McGann if he had special plans for that occasion.

“Wow, it is coming up,” he agrees, furrowing his brow slightly at the thought. "Hmm. I dunno,” he ponders. “We’ll come up with something,” and then find a home for whatever new and exciting additions may be dreamed up at this ever-changing, ever-growing crown jewel of the Grand Strand.

For more information on visiting Brookgreen Gardens, go to: brookgreen.org