Each year all of us at Lebanon’s Winter Wonderland receive a gift from McKendree University. Between 20 and 40 young students descend on Horner Park to spend part of a day to help us with our display.

McKendree calls it “Into The Streets”. All ‘new to the university’ students are sent out to interact with the people around the school. It is a great way for them to meet us, and for us to learn about them. In the doing, a lot of work gets done.

For us at LWW, that means maintenance of our props – usually the cutouts which need painting – but not always. There have been some very sore fingers out there from helping create some of the animated light show props. (Pushing Pixels isn’t all that easy.) There has also been a great amount of paint used to update and maintain our legacy wooden props. They have done well enough that we still have the vast majority of the wooden props even after all of these years. (Wooden props were originally created in 2007/2008 for our first display in 2008.)

We want to make sure the students that have come to assist us over the years understand how much we appreciate their assistance. You do more in a few hours than we could do in weeks.

Thanks to all of you!