GILROY
– Ongoing financial struggles at Bonfante Gardens won’t be the
Scrooge in the horticultral theme park’s plans for Christmas after
all.
GILROY – Ongoing financial struggles at Bonfante Gardens won’t be the Scrooge in the horticultral theme park’s plans for Christmas after all.
The Gilroy-based amusement park this week announced a Sunday, Dec. 8 holiday celebration that will include a parade, live musical entertainment, rides and a whole bunch of Christmas lights.
“The park will be holiday lit. It’s going to be beautiful,” said Patti Hale, a member of the park’s board of directors. “The celebration is going to be huge.”
The event will trail Gilroy’s Dec. 7 Christmas Tree Lighting event, a downtown tradition the past two decades. Bonfante’s celebration will run from 4 to 8 p.m. with the parade starting at 4:30 p.m. There is a $2 fee for parking at Bonfante.
In October, Hale sought to have the downtown tree lighting event moved to Bonfante after theme park directors realized their holiday plans overlapped the downtown celebration. The Citywide Christmas Program committee, which runs the downtown event for the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce, decided not to move west.
The chamber said it wanted to keep the tradition downtown to help kick off the holiday shopping season and to make it easier for residents to show up. That decision, along with the theme park’s revenue shortfalls, had put a holiday celebration at the park in jeopardy until this week.
“It was not an easy decision because there is a cost involved, but we want to show our appreciation to the community in some way,” Hale said.
“We’re still going to be a part of the downtown event. We’ll have our characters in the parade and we’ll have season passes at the chamber office,” said Hale.
If purchased Dec. 7 at the chamber or Dec. 8 at the park, season passes cost $49, a $20 discount.
Hale said that once the park started to re-plan its holiday event, a slew of people began offering their services.
“We have about 90 to 100 volunteers running this with us,” said Hale. “We’ve even had people provide horses for the parade. I knew it would be like this. This is a great community.”
Originally, Bonfante Gardens slated a six-week run of extravagant holiday-theme light shows from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. But in light of revenue shortfalls that have plagued the theme park since its March 2001 inception, directors decided a large-scale event was too expensive.
On Oct. 3, Bonfante Gardens announced an across the board layoff of 50 full-time employees. Soon after, the park decided to hold a trimmed-down holiday celebration the weekend of Dec. 7-8, the same date as the Christmas tree lighting downtown.
In addition to watching the parade and lighting of the trees, event-goers can take pictures with Santa Claus for $5. A petting zoo, carousel rides, hay rides and ornament decorating are also slated.
For more information on the event or participating as a volunteer, call Joel Goldsmith at 847-6174 or Patti Hale at 847-4956.
