Resort owners’ Christmas display grows each year
KETCHUM — It is not unusual for Art Box to walk out on his front porch and find a large box or two full of Christmas lights and decorations.
“People are always helping us out by bringing us some of their lights and decorations,” he said. “Sometimes they’ve decided they don’t want to decorate their house anymore. So they drop them by our house, and it becomes a part of what we do here.”
With the help of family and friends, Box and his wife, June, are hanging more than 500,000 Christmas lights and setting up dozens of Christmas decorations near their house and at Pine Lodge Resort, the small collection of cabins they own in the woods near the lake.
It has become one of the biggest Christmas lights decorations in rural northeastern Oklahoma.
June Box said she has had a lifelong love of decorating at Christmas, but among others it “seems to be sort of in decline. I just don’t think people decorate their houses like they used to.”
That is not the case for the Box family home, sitting on a scenic overlook above Duck Creek on Grand Lake.
“We’ve been decorating for as long as I can remember,” said June. “It is has just grown a lot in the last 14 or 15 years.”
Pine Lodge Resort has 10 cabins, 18 mobile homes and 26 RV sites near the south end of Grand Lake. It is about five miles east of Ketchum near the shore of Duck Creek.
During the holidays, it becomes one of the most dramatic Christmas displays in this region, especially considering it is a familyand-friends operation.
“We do it all ourselves,” said June. “Our son Mark is kind of in charge. He does so much work on it. He’s the one turning it on and turning it off every evening. He’s the one that goes out and checks all the lights, and he turns on all of the displays and lights.
“We have a person that works with us and one of our neighbors. That’s about it.”
And they are completely swamped in lights and decorations.
They normally store everything in a nearby 1,500-squarefoot building. Around Nov. 1, they move the decorations to the small game room near the pool in the middle of the Pine Lodge Resort cabins.
It normally takes about three weeks to hang all of the lights and set up all of the decorations.
“I’m always amazed it takes us about three weeks to get everything up but it only takes about 10 days to get it all down and put away,” said Art.
“I guess at the end maybe we’re eager to be done with it.”
On a recent day, they were unraveling miles of lights, plugging in each string to check all of the bulbs and then putting them near the trees where they will hang.
“When we first started doing this, it only took a stringer or two to hang in the trees,” said June.
“Now, some of the trees have gotten so big that it takes maybe five or six stringers.”
It all started as a way to gain some attention during the Parade of Lights at Grand Lake.
In 2001, Art and June, who retired to Grand Lake from Broken Arrow nine years earlier, bought a 1914 Willy’s Overland vehicle and decided to decorate it and drive it in the parade.
“So we had lights all over that vehicle, and we drove it across the dam and back over to Langley,” Art said. “It seemed to be pretty popular.”
The next year, as they were building their first two cabins for what would become Pine Lodge Resort, they decided to add a hot tub on a trailer behind the antique vehicle.
They had a friend dress up like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and put a smoke machine in the hot tub. All of it was brightly lighted by Christmas lights.
“It was an idea to help promote the fact that we were getting ready to open a couple of cabins with hot tubs at the lake,” said Art. “It proved to be very popular.
“Decorating everything at Pine Lodge with lights kind of grew out of that parade.”
The lights are turned on Thanksgiving evening. From then until Christmas, the lights are on every evening, 5-10 p.m.
“Honestly, we like driving through Pine Lodge looking at all of the lights, too,” said Art. “It is really pretty and really gets you in the Christmas spirit. When it snows, it is really beautiful.
“All of the neighbors up here in the cove have kind of joined in. We are kind of in the woods up here, so the Christmas lights and decorations are really nice.”