WHEELING, W. Va. — With some areas of the Mountain State experiencing the first snowfall of the season Thursday, it seems appropriate enough that one of the notable winter traditions kicked off on the same day.
The Winter Festival of Lights has made the Oglebay Resort and Conference Center in Wheeling a destination since 1985 for holiday enthusiast. Among those enthusiasts is Amy Shuler Goodwin, Commissioner of Tourism, who was on hand for the November 14 opening of this year’s display.
“It’s a continuation of our ‘Go Outside and Play’ campaign here in the Division of Tourism and anybody from the Northern Panhandle or North Central knows that Oglebay Resort is the best place, one of the best places in America to go see holiday lights,” Goodwin said.
One of the reasons the lights have garnered acclaim from the likes of AOL Travel, the Travel Channel and Discover America, is the sheer size of the display.
“This is not a couple of lights, it takes us two hours if we really want to take our time and go through all of it,” Goodwin said. “It’s a six-mile drive, 300 acres through Oglebay of some of the best light displays we have in the country.”
Goodwin also credits the creativity of the displays as a drawing point.
“We’re talking about a jack-in-the-box that’s two stories tall that is animated and he comes to life. One of my favorite displays is right at Wilson Lodge, down one of the fairways and it’s a skier. He actually looks like he’s skiing downhill.”
For those unable to make it up to Wheeling, Goodwin assures that more displays and other winter traditions will begin to kick off in the coming weeks across the state.
“Blennerhassett, there going to have their ‘Trees of Our Heritage’ and that starts on Monday, Bluefield City Park, Fayette County Park, Cedar Lakes, Coonskin, Chief Logan, the Greenbrier, the West Virginia State Farm Museum” she said. “There’s lots of wonderful light displays all across the state.”
As Tourism Commissioner for West Virginia, Goodwin recognizes that these displays start coming about at a good time for the state.
“This is a really great time of year for us,” she said. “Although sometimes people think of us as a state where we spend most of our time in the spring and summer white water rafting, or as ‘leaf peepers’ in the fall, we have an amazing amount of visitors coming in to West Virginia to visit family.”
Those visitors can go though the Winter Festival of Lights at Oglebay Resort through January 4 for a requested per car donation.