Dallas – As the season turns to fall around the Dallas Arboretum, the plentiful number of pumpkins in the park is downright perplexing. Over 100,000 orange, white and green gourds take up tons of space and seem to be spread as far as the eye can see. But before Santa can lay his finger aside his nose and give a nod, the garden is transformed into a cheery Christmas village full of folks getting festive for holidays. “It’s unlike anything you’ll see,” said Dustin Miller, the Senior Director of Experience and Innovation at the arboretum.
Miller oversees this massive production of lights, sounds, and holiday cheer known as Holiday at the Arboretum. Since 2020 the Dallas Arboretum has created this Christmas Village every holiday season. If it feels like you’re not in Texas anymore, that’s because it was created that way. “It’s really meant to be a small European hamlet,” said Miller. “If you go to Europe, even now to the Christmas markets, you would see very similar things. So you go into each house and there’s a different shopkeeper. We have a beer garden. Just different areas where you can hang out with a family and really feel like you’ve been transformed into Europe.”
Transforming the arboretum into a Christmas wonderland every year is no easy task, and it takes the whole team, plus a few contractors, to put up the buildings, sidewalks, and everything else you need for a winter village. ”They come in with heavy equipment,” said Miller. “We store a lot of this offsite on our greenhouse property, other things in different storage locations throughout the city, but it takes a massive team of both our staff and contractors to pull this together. By the end of January, if we don’t have any crazy weather, all this is gone and they’ve got grass seed out, starting to grow. March, you can walk out here and have a lush grass.”
In the middle of the village courtyard, you’ll find a 23 foot tall multi-tiered contraption called the Christmas pyramid. Festive figurines dance around each level of the pyramid, and they each represent different parts of the arboretum garden. “Each level, it has pieces built in that reflect the garden too,” said Miller. “So when you look at the second one, they all have flowers that you see throughout the garden during the year. So we definitely thought about what those pieces were, which shopkeepers are represented, and they show up in there as well.”
And of course, a festive European village wouldn’t be complete without some traditional snacks. “Bratwurst, stollen bread,” said Miller. “We’ve got a fresh baker here making German and European breads every day, sweets and treats, mulled wine. You name it, we’ve got it.”
While the village is impressive, if you take a stroll through the gardens, you’ll come across some massive snow globe-like displays. “Picture what you would see in the store windows when you were a kid,” said Miller. “Each one represents a different day of the 12 days of Christmas, has live music, animation. So we have partridges in a pear tree, we have ladies dancing, all to different holiday theme music. They’re also built every year. That build starts in August and they literally come in thousands of pieces. The outside is put together largely by local firemen and then we have set designers come in and rebuild the inside each year.”
Miller and the rest of the arboretum crew put together the village for Holiday at the Arboretum every year to help share the true Christmas Spirit with all who visit. “It really is for me about spending time with family and friends, thinking about things that as a child, having those fond memories and then passing those on as well,” said Miller.
“It’s what we all want to see at Christmastime. We want kids to enjoy the season and step away from their daily life and just enjoy the magic of it. And it’s really hard not to do it when you come in here.”