How many lightbulbs does it take to light up an award-winning Christmas grotto?

Behind the scenes at Kent Life, a team of elves have been extremely busy constructing and putting the finishing touches to the magical Kent Life Christmas Grotto inside the Big Top.  This year, we have an extra spring in our step as just recently, Experience Christmas was awarded a silver in the Beautiful South Tourism Awards for Excellence!

To celebrate, we wanted to reflect on our final event for 2019 and share some insider info into what goes into our award-winning Experience Christmas extravaganza. So, we sent one of our nine elves to investigate and report back (it took him so long that we thought he’d got lost!!!) – and here’s why:

• Our twinkly Christmas trail lighting the way to Father Christmas is made up of no less than 44,000 lightbulbs! Did you know? Joseph Swan from Sunderland invented fairy lights.  He was the first to perfect the incandescent electric lamp.  After the Savoy theatre was fitted out with1200 electric bulbs made by Swan in 1881, he was commissioned by the theatre owner to create miniature lights for the dresses of the lead fairies for the opening night of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. A year later, the first fairy lights were put on a Christmas tree in the US as a publicity stunt.
• It takes 172kg of artificial snow to recreate this winter wonderland. (At the time of writing, the current odds for a White Christmas are 6-1, so this is probably your best chance of a snowy festive photo!)
• There are 120 Christmas trees decorated with a staggering 1,854 baubles
• Over 3,000 gingerbread men will have been decorated at our workshops and more than 6,000 mince pies will have been consumed by the time Christmas Eve rolls around. (That’s just a sliver of the 781,177,935 mince pies Britain is expected to eat this Christmas!)
• Father Christmas and his elves have been extremely busy writing more than 3,450 letters to all the little visitors, who have made an appointment to see him at Kent Life this year.
• Finally, the Head Elf has been up and down the Kent Life hill more times than he can count in the Land Train!!!

Phew!  Right, time to go and start switching on those Christmas lights again!

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