While most people are waiting until the end of November to put up holiday lights on their house, the city of Snoqualmie has been working on the lighting setup in downtown all month.

“We get some people asking us, why are we starting this on Nov. 1? Aren’t we early?” said Shane Will, Parks professional with the city. “Well, it takes while to get up. Originally, with two people, it took us five and a half weeks the first time I did it. We are down to three weeks now. We are making some progress on how long it takes to do it.”

Will and the city’s parks crew have been working on setting up more than 60,000 holiday lights in downtown Snoqualmie in preparation for the city’s official tree lighting on Saturday, Nov. 26, at Railroad Community Park.

What started as a smaller project to decorate the city with festive lights has become a full light show with a system that makes the lights flash along with music. Will said he started working on the holiday light project five years ago and has seen this effort grow to include more staff and more lights.

“I heard stories about the old days being about 10,000 lights. They wanted to make it a bigger deal to really draw in people to downtown.” he said. “Five years ago, we started with 40,000 lights and we are up to about 60,000 now. It’s growing a little bit every year.”

Will, along with parks workers Jorge Orozco, Lenny Schwab and Scott MacVikar, were out at Railroad Community Park on Thursday, Nov. 17, putting lights on the trees, gazebo and all the way down to the Centennial Log.

Traditionally, the city’s tree lighting has been in early December but it was moved to just after Thanksgiving, so now the parks crew is working on a condensed schedule.

“So with three weeks, we are looking at a lot of hours. An average of 200 hours a week, 550 to 600 man hours to put all these lights up,” Will said. “We are going to go past 60,000 lights this year. So it takes some time.”

In terms of placement and design of the downtown lighting, the parks crew was given free rein to do the work however they wanted to. Over the past five years they have grown, not only in the amount of lights, but also in the technology used.

“They bought us a whole bunch of lights and let us do our own thing. It was really up to us and it’s evolved over the years, we started making the lights flash and trying to turn it into an actual show instead of just a Christmas tree,” Will said.

The crew used a device that synchronized 55,000 lights to linked music for a few years, but it was stolen.

“Now they make a smaller box which will only do about 40,000 lights, so that’s what we are trying to do this year,” he said.

In talking about running electricity to all of the lights around downtown Snoqualmie, Will said LED lights are important to help reduce power consumption.

“The big thing that really helps us out is the invention of the LED light. You can run up to 13,000 lights off a single outlet. It makes it easier to not have to upgrade your system for more power,” he said. “We used to have to run close to 1,000 feet of extension cords to make that happen, now we just plug right in.”

This year the crew also received volunteer help from downtown Snoqualmie businesses and Mount Si High School students. Will said the volunteers were mostly from the businesses on the first weekend and the high school students helped as part of their community service projects.

Will said he and the parks crew are excited to see the final product, and hope the people who come to the tree lighting will enjoy the light show and atmosphere they have created.

“It’s an excellent teamwork thing for us and it’s just amazing how it all comes together, it started with just two of us doing this and now we’ve got the whole crew involved and the businesses,” he said.

“It’s really nice to see the Christmas spirit in everybody. It’s getting spread around and I couldn’t be happier.”

The Snoqualmie parks crew using an elevated work platform to reach the top of the tree that will be featured at the holiday tree lighting on Saturday, Nov. 26. (Evan Pappas/Staff Photo)

Scott MacVikar and Shane Will line up their elevated work platform with the large tree on Thursday, Nov. 17. (Evan Pappas/Staff Photo)

Jorge Orozco lines a small tree on the corner of S.E. King Street and Railroad Avenue with lights. The tree trunk was wrapped with a cord of lights that spun all the way up into the branches. (Evan Pappas/Staff Photo)