A Tour of Nashville’s Biggest and Brightest Holiday Displays

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But let’s be honest — it’s also the messiest. All the good that comes with the holidays — making time for those you love, exchanging presents and baking cookies — comes with traffic, crowds and the unyielding pressure to achieve holiday perfection by spending as much as you can as often as you can. 

But despite all that, one thing about the holiday season still feels pure to me: holiday lights. Whether it’s a sweeping landscape of millions of twinkling bulbs or just a couple simple strings of lights pinned along a small house’s rooftop, Christmas lights soothe my soul with the power of a thousand seasonal-affective-disorder-fighting sun lamps. They are what get me through December’s long, dark nights. (A daily antidepressant with an eggnog chaser also helps.)

Since new light displays are popping up in Nashville every year, I recently succumbed to my lumen cravings and visited five of Middle Tennessee’s biggest and brightest ones — from Gaylord Opryland Resort’s annual Country Christmas (now in its 36th year!) to Nashville’s newest addition, GLOW at First Tennessee Park. Here’s how each exhibit stacked up, from the goofy and gaudy to the embarrassingly expensive.

Zoolumination: Chinese Festival of Lights

Through Feb. 2 at the Nashville Zoo (3777 Nolensville Pike)

The Nashville Zoo’s Zoolumination is a vibrant celebration and the perfect light display for folks who don’t want Christmas to be crammed into their eye sockets at every turn.

Hundreds of glowing silk lanterns, custom-made in Zigong, China, depict larger-than-life lions and tigers and panda bears — oh my! — but also flamingos, giraffes, elephants, pigs, okapi, cranes, kangaroos and peacocks. There are gardens “growing” giant flowers, a lighted replica of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven and an elaborate 214-foot-long Chinese dragon. But the Kylin installation is especially mesmerizing. Unlike the rest of the Zoolumination, which is built using silk lanterns, the Kylin — mythical creatures said to bring good luck to those who see them — are built with 60,000 (!) tiny glass vials filled with colored liquid. When lit from behind, the bottles create a shimmering mosaic effect. 

But there’s Christmas-related fun to be had too — the zoo’s Grassmere Historic Home and Farm has been transformed into Santa’s village, filled with lanterns depicting snowmen, elves and Christmas trees, with Santa photo ops every night through Dec. 23.

Tennessee Dancing Lights of Christmas

Through Jan. 4  at the James E. Ward Agricultural Center (945 E. Baddour Parkway, Lebanon)

Does the Tennessee Dancing Lights of Christmas display, now in its 10th year, feature an 8-bit baby Jesus scrolling across a tower of Christmas lights? Yep! Does the soundtrack, which all the dancing lights are synced to, include a mash-up of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” rewritten with Christmassy lyrics like “Jingle bells / Straight to hell / Yes, my friends / You’re on the naughty list again”? It sure does! 

For $30 per family vehicle, you and your loved ones get to stay cozy in the car while driving through tunnels of flashing lights and past Christmas trees singing along to songs like “Disco Santa” and a party remix of “Amazing Grace” (a song that absolutely does not need to be remixed as a party song, but OK). 

The whole thing is dizzying, gaudy and just the right amount of over-the-top. As my fellow travelers and I drove past the last few lights, I begged my group to drive through it again. Sadly, I was vetoed. Bah, humbug. 

After leaving the light park, you can stop off at Santa’s village for hot chocolate, s’mores, a couple kid-size carnival rides and a small petting zoo that’s home to some very assertive goats and alpacas. They’ll let you give ’em a pat as long as you offer them a bite of a pellet-filled wafer cone, which are sold for $2 a pop and worth every cent.

Holiday LIGHTS

Through Jan. 5 at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens (1200 Forrest Park Drive)

While most of Nashville’s light displays are focused on building dense havens that pack in as many lights as physically possible, Cheekwood has made good use of its 55 acres by spreading out millions of lights along a mile-long route. Everything seems to glow a little brighter against the pure black sky, and there’s no bottlenecking when folks stop to take selfies.

One portion of the path features oversized lighted flowers and vines that bend over the walkway to make you feel like a tiny Alice walking through Wonderland’s garden of giant flowers. In another section, “running” lights “fall” from the trees to make it appear as though it’s snowing. Beautiful blue, purple, green and white light sculptures reflect on Cheekwood’s ponds, and twinkling blue lights fill the streams that run with water during the summer months.

Even the train at the center of Storybook Trail has gotten a holiday makeover — it’s been converted into the North Pole Express, with flashing and dancing snowflakes and other decor synced to holiday tunes. There’s lots of room to wander around — even on a busy weekend night you’re able to wander around without feeling like you’re battling a crowd — and while you’re there, don’t forget to hop into the Cheekwood Mansion to see how rich people celebrated Christmas in the 1920s. So many fancy dishes, poinsettias and vintage trains!

GLOW Nashville

Through Dec. 31 at First Tennessee Park (19 Junior Gilliam Way)

GLOW is Nashville’s newest holiday light display, and it’s a stunner — it’s got 4 million lights making up nearly a dozen different light installations, from a polar-bear-filled forest of jagged icicles to bow-topped presents big enough to walk through. 

There are also tiny wooden cottages to hide in, and the main feature, the Frozen Fortress Skating Rink, is a two-story fort made of “ice” crystals that looks like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Another especially fun installation is the weird doughnut-shaped walkway where hundreds (maybe thousands?) of glowing fuchsia rope lights swing from above like tentacles of a as-yet-undiscovered deep-sea monster. It felt very much like wandering through one of installation artist Yayoi Kusama’s infinity-mirror rooms … but with screaming children playing tag.

Cool? Very! But a visit to GLOW doesn’t come cheap: The walk-up rate for two adults, after fees and taxes, was $78.08. And once inside, we paid another $4 apiece for two small hot chocolates and $5 for a big-enough-to-share s’mores cookie. A ride down the Reindeer Run Tube Park is included in admission, but a 90-minute ice-skating session will add another $10 per person. Yikes. Even with discounts for buying tickets online or for Tuesday or Wednesday “value nights,” GLOW is, by far, the most expensive holiday light experience in town. 

A Country Christmas

Through Jan. 1 at Gaylord Opryland Resort (2800 Opryland Drive)

Gaylord Opryland Resort’s Country Christmas is a must-see — not only is it my favorite holiday light display in Davidson County, but it costs nothing to wander through the hotel’s densely decorated atriums. Each section follows a different theme. In one atrium, millions of classic white lights “rain” down from the glass ceiling. Another is filled with flashing and brightly colored installations that reflect and shimmer on the surface of the hotel’s indoor river. It all feels so magical — a little Las Vegas-y too, but mostly magical. 

Outside the hotel is a little holiday village with snow tubing, games, ice skating and the annual Ice! exhibit, wherein more than 2 million pounds of ice are carved to depict scenes from A Christmas Story (yup, that includes a frozen statue of Ralphie’s pink bunny suit), but that’s all just noise. If you’re looking for the perfect way to combat the long nights, it costs nothing to park at Opry Mills mall, find a bench under the lights and let your vision fall to a soft focus as you drift off into a Christmas-induced trance.