Christmas has come and gone.

The numbers of holiday visitors to Great Bend’s Trail of Lights are tallied.

But, while most of us have stuffed our trees and tubs of decorations back up into the attic, Great Bend Public Lands personnel are still struggling to take down and store the city’s Christmas lights and displays.

“The cold has slowed us down some,” Public Works Director Scott Keeler said. It takes weeks to set things up, and the spate of winter weather may mean it takes just as long to tear things down.

Many of the stakes that hold the brightly lit exhibits in place are frozen into the ground, and many of the strings of lights are encased in ice.

Keeler’s crews are removing what they can now. Come next week, when things are forecasted to warm up some, “we will be at it hot and heavy,” he said.

Meanwhile, Christina Hayes, Great Bend community coordinator and Convention and Visitors Bureau director, gave her report on the 2023 Trail of Lights when she addressed the City Council Monday night. “I would consider it a success,” she said. The report includes the number of cars that make the colorful rounds, where the cars are from and how much the festive travelers donate to the traditional Christmas display.

In a normal year, the trail is open from the Saturday after Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve. However, bad weather on the opening weekend caused the cancellation of the Home for the Holidays Christmas Festival events, including the inaugural night for the trail. 

“We only collected for 25 days this year” due to missing the usually busy opening night and other weather cancellations, she said. “We had several weather events, but we still had a total of 2,227 cars come through.” 

That is down from over 3,000 in the past two years.

“What I was really impressed with this year was our donation totals,” she said. “I thought it would be significantly down because of the missed days, but honestly it really came up great.”

Trail tourists donated $4,146.55 that will help replace and maintain the bright displays. This was up from around $4,000 last year, but down some for the 2020 high of $4,900.

The total is reported by the greeters who manned the shack on the south side of Brit Spaugh Park from 6-8 p.m. only, she said. These community volunteers handed out visitor information, took donations for the lighting fund, counted cars and recorded where the license plates were from.

“We did have people say that they were disappointed that the city didn’t have anything new,” she said. “But I think a lot of people care about the maintenance, and they want to make sure that the Trail of Lights continues.”

She gave a big star to the Busy Buzzers 4-H club. Members brought in the most money in one night on Dec. 22.

“But I also want to give a big thanks to all of our volunteers who helped and worked that Trail of Lights.”

The trail sees its most visitors from central Kansas, But, many from other Kansas counties and other states also make the drive she said.

This year, it saw someone from much farther away.

“We had someone come through from Switzerland,” she said. She was visiting the area, heard about the Trail of Lights and just wanted to check it out, Hayes said.  

Greeters Jan Westfall and Julie Smith were working the gate and really promoted the trail and the community as a whole to the woman, who was impressed.

Here’s a breakdown of the number of car tags that visited the Trail of Lights:

• Barton, 1,841

• Pawnee, 56

• Rice, 38

• Rush, 34

• Stafford, 33

• Ellsworth, 23

• Sedgwick, 19

• Ellis, 17

• Reno, 13

• Saline, 11

• Edwards, nine

• Russell, six

• McPherson and Gray, five

• Douglas, Ford and Pratt, four

• Shawnee, Cloud and Sheridan, three

• Hodgeman, Anderson and Ness, two

Counties with one tag recorded included: Barber, Bourbon, Chautauqua, Cheyenne, Cowley, Crawford, Decatur, Dickinson, Elk, Finney, Geary, Harper, Johnson, Kingman, Kiowa, Leavenworth, Labette, Logan, Lincoln, Lyon, Nemaha, Norton, Phillips, Rawlins, Riley, Sheridan, Sherman, Thomas, Trego and Washington.

The top five states were:

• Kansas, 2,170

• Missouri and Texas, 11

• Oklahoma and Colorado, six

Other states were Nebraska, Florida, Arkansas, California, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Alabama, Ohio, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin.