The Glovers dazzle drive-through visitors with their annual Christmas Wonderlands.
Photo Above: From left to right: Keith Glover, Mikki Glover Hale and Josh Glover. Collectively, they may well be the first family of outdoor Christmas displays. © Shadrack Productions.
The images from her childhood will forever be stamped in Mikki Glover Hale’s memory: dancing to classic Christmas tunes in the living room, begging her mom Brenda to let her decorate before Halloween, singing carols with her extended family. But her favorite, she says, was the night she saw Santa fly through the sky.
“It was spectacular,” says Hale, 37, marketing director and co-owner of Shadrack Productions. “I actually remember the window that my cousin and I convinced ourselves that we saw him.”
That magical encounter, along with the yuletide passion Hale shares with her dad Keith Glover and brother Josh, would eventually compel the trio to create the first Shadrack’s Christmas Wonderland, an over-the-top drive-through light show in their hometown of Bristol, Tennessee.
The seed was planted in 1997 when Glover, a longtime high school principal, launched a successful water sports business and named it Shadrack after the musical band he’d played in as a young man.
Over the next decade, the company expanded to multiple locations, began selling boats and RVs, and opened a NASCAR campground at their headquarters, with Hale and her sibling working full-time with their father. But Shadrack was a seasonal company, and they needed a way to keep their growing cadre of employees busy during the cold-weather down time.
Glover and his children were fascinated by a television commercial that synchronized upbeat music with the changing videos. “We’re rather a creative bunch, so we decided to start building light displays,” says Hale.
They tracked down two companies that could supply the equipment they needed and hired one of them. Shadrack’s Christmas Wonderland debuted at the Bristol campground in 2007.
“We were the first show of its kind that was that large,” Hale says. “The challenge of that is what drove us that first year. And people loved it. At that point, we realized that we really wanted to make it larger. … We actually set a goal of making this our primary focus and backing out of the boats and RVs.”
©Chad Branton: Sevierville, TN Chamber of Commerce
The Glovers now focus on Christmas Wonderlands year-round. In 2019, the electronic productions, which feature hundreds of thousands of LED lights flashing to the rhythm of the music along a designated route, took place in Tennessee (Sevierville and Jackson) and North Carolina (Charlotte and Tryon), as well as Birmingham, Alabama, and Butler, Pennsylvania.
Approximately 10 employees design, build, wire and program the displays and serve as show managers in each city. To support the individual communities, Shadrack hires large teams of locals to assist. They also donate to neighborhood nonprofits such as Relay for Life and the Ronald McDonald House. In the past seven years alone, the Glovers have given $800,000 to the charities.
The three family members are cross-trained on all facets of the business, from cleaning toilets to designing and setting up shows. Hale’s primary job, however, is marketing. Josh handles operations. And their dad, who “oversees the big stuff,” now concentrates mostly on writing music and programming the lights. It takes six weeks to erect a show’s infrastructure; after the event closes the first weekend in January, it takes four more to tear everything down—and all this after hundreds of hours of computer programming that starts in the summer.
To enjoy the show, visitors tune into a low-frequency radio station and are instantly immersed in a sea of light, color and sound. Most of the animated displays follow themes—Twelve Days of Christmas, for example, or Santa’s Beach Party—that rotate every few years to keep the experience fresh.
When it comes to the imaginative designs, Hale says, “It really is a family effort. We sit and brainstorm these things. Josh will say something and then I’ll take it in a different direction, or Dad will. It’s just a roundtable topic until we land on something that makes us all smile.”
Public feedback has been enormous, she says. “It’s sort of like ‘wow.’ You can actually hear them out the window. Some people have come so many times they can sing along to some of our music that they wouldn’t otherwise know.”
Wrote one guest via social media, “I took my 4-year-old daughter. Just to hear her reaction was priceless. It brought tears to my eyes.” Another commented, “The show was fantastic and wonderful. So different from other Christmas shows.”
“It makes me happy to see what we are doing making someone else so happy,” Hale says. “There are times that I go sit in my vehicle and roll down the windows inside our show and just listen to the kids. It’s rewarding to see people overjoyed by the products that we created.”
Like other small businesses in the Blue Ridge and beyond, Shadrack’s Christmas Wonderland has been greatly impacted by the coronavirus shutdown. As of late summer, the Glovers were still unsure of this year’s locations. (Sevierville is a definite, though.) “We had several that were all but signed contracts and then COVID hit,” Hale says. “One of them is a [coronavirus] testing site, and another one has an alternate care facility and they’ve had to keep all the parking open.”
No matter where they end up, or how many there are, the holiday extravaganzas will take on new meaning this year, she says. “People are still going to have the opportunity to come and have that magical feeling of Christmas, and I think that’s something that we are all longing for. We’re so limited this year; we don’t have a whole lot to look forward to like we’re used to. At this event, you’ll feel comfortable going and having no contact and no real reason or opportunity to risk your family’s health. It’s just pure delight and it’s not tainted by this virus.”
The 2020 Shadrack Christmas Wonderland in Sevierville will take place November 13-January 3. Check shadrackchristmas.com for details and info about shows in other cities.
3 THINGS MIKKI GLOVER HALE LOVES ABOUT HER FAMILY’S LIGHT SHOWS
1. The RGB Tunnel
“The tunnel is one of the things that people can’t get enough of,” Hale says. “It’s all RGB—red, green and blue—and it can be programmed to do any color, any sequence, anything we want it to do. You sit in it and it’s mesmerizing.” (The company also sells customized tunnels that can be set up in a few hours.)
2. Color Washes
Appearing in multiple colors for most of the show, the lights occasionally sync to highlight a single hue. “Those are very brief, but I love it when it does the color sweep and everywhere you look is that color for just a second or maybe one beat in the music, or two or three,” says Hale. “It’s neat after you’ve had all the colors going.”
3. The Humorous Displays
“Most of them have a comical element, and I like that they make me chuckle,” Hale says. Even so, she adds, “Most everything we do is Christmas-based, not holiday. It’s not that we’re intolerant of other people’s beliefs. It’s not that at all. It’s just that we celebrate Christmas for Christ.”
The story above appears in our November / December 2020 issue.
