UIW students checking scores of bulbs for duds

In just two months, it’ll begin looking a lot like Christmas in San Antonio — and you can thank about 150 students at the University of the Incarnate Word for that.

For the 35th year in a row, a million — well, between 1.1 million and 1.2 million — light bulbs will illuminate UIW’s main campus.

The university’s Light the Way is “the unofficial official start of the holiday season in San Antonio,” said Meghan Kuentz, UIW’s special event manager.

“We’re going to put on our lights, and then it trickles down the river into the downtown area, and really brings illumination and the holiday festive spirit to San Antonio.”

But before those lights can be switched on at the

Nov. 20 kickoff — ushering in Bing Crosby tunes and holiday whimsy — someone's got to check every single one of those 1 million light bulbs.

That's where the students come in.

On Saturday morning, instead of sleeping in or prepping for an exam, they volunteered to hunt for dead or broken light bulbs — not on a string of lights wrapping around a living room, but on 200 miles worth of wiring.

“It's a lot of lights,” Kuentz said.

The lights are left up all year, except for when they're taken down during the annual bulb-checking event. That means Mother Nature takes a toll. Some bulbs get broken, while others lose their color.

“If we don't replace them, we'll just have white lights everywhere,” Kuentz said. “Which is just not the look.”

And then there's the thieves.

“We've found the squirrels like to take the light bulbs,” Kuentz said. “They're rascals.”

For many of the students who each thumbed through dozens or hundreds of lights Saturday, it was a way to support Light the Way, which they said is one of the university's most cherished traditions.

“I've heard a lot of people come out to” fix the lights, UIW freshman Betzaida Diaz said. “I just thought that this was interesting because the Light the Way event, I've never been to it, but I want to support it.”

Carlos Javier Sanchez / Contributor file photo Isabella Martinez, 4, takes in the thousands of holiday lights during UIW’s 2019 Light the Way celebration. Student volunteers are checking lights for this year.