Cullman County parks director Doug Davenport isn’t sure, but he figures there’re more than 2 million lights, by now, that illuminate the Winter Wonderland Christmas light display that greets drive-through visitors each year at Sportsman Lake Park. After helping the holiday attraction grow over the past decade, at some point the twinkle tally grew so large that the real number kind of became an abstraction.

“This will be my tenth Christmas, and it’s really grown into something pretty big over time,” said Davenport of the annual showcase, which entered its 20th overall season November 18. “Every year, we try to spend around $10,000 to $15,000 on improvements, and we try to rotate new things in from year to year to make sure kids get caught up in the awe and the spectacle of it. This year, I think we’re adding something like 13 new displays,“ Davenport told The Times in September.

Winter Wonderland is popular — hugely popular. Municipal parks departments typically don’t operate with much expectation of turning a profit, but even so, the light display is one of the only annual events that actually sends back money to Cullman County.

The park staff doesn’t do a direct head count (“We charge by the car, and there’s no way of knowing how many people are in every car,” notes Davenport), but last year, he said, “we made around $217,000 in 30 days. We make half our annual budget just from the Christmas lights. That’s money the county can use to stretch taxpayer dollars further, and use it to make improvements elsewhere in our parks.”

The drive-through’s $10 per-car fee will get you in to see the lights, but in recent years, Winter Wonderland has added fresh enticements to hop out and stay a while.

“Of course we’ve got the concession stand where people can get out and have hot chocolate, but three years ago, we added what’s turned out to be the most amazing thing for guests,” Davenport recalls. “We set up a photo booth where kids could get their picture taken with Santa for five dollars, where you get your picture back with a keepsake photo frame. That has doubled in size every year since, and it just keeps growing.”

Last year, the park built on that idea, adding a “Santa’s Gift Shop” that offers small Christmas toys and treats — “and by the second night it was open, we were scrambling to come up with inventory,” said Davenport. “It stayed like that just about every night we were open. We added another snow machine last year, too. Now we have two.”

The Winter Wonderland might mean dollar signs for the parks department, but it’s just a small slice of what Sportsman Lake — created in the 1950s near what was then the city’s northern fringe — has to offer as a vast oasis only a mile and a half from the busiest part of downtown.

Some of the park’s amenities are durable staples that go back decades while others are relatively new. Feeding the ducks that roam the lake’s edges has been a recreational rite of passage for generations of adults who spent their younger years in Cullman, as has walking the park’s scenic winding trails and trying to beat par at the nearby 18-hole mini-golf course.

Children still clamor to jump aboard the miniature train that winds around the lake, and one of the park’s comparatively newer features — its summer splash pad — has become a destination in itself for kids in search of a soak to beat the heat. There’s more, of course, for guests of all ages: paddle boats, bike rides, feeding the fish, or reserving one of the park’s larger picnic pavilions for family gatherings, church events, and office outings.

Best of all, there’s no cost, during regular operating hours, to enter the park and find a quiet spot to take a break. Its convenient location just a stone’s throw from the bustle of U.S. Highway 31 has long made it a favorite spot for couples, families, and solitary days guests — often looking for a slice of lunchtime peace amid a busy workday — to drop by for a brief hour of respite.

Setting up all those lights and Christmas displays has to be a big job, right? Davenport says it is, requiring weeks of preparation and an all-hands-on-deck call to parks department staff to help pitch in. “It takes us about five weeks to put everything up, and the about two weeks to take it all down again,” he said.

“We’ll pull people in from our other parks when the time comes, and we’ll have as many as 18 folks or so out there helping put up the lights. Some of those Christmas displays are more than 15 feet tall, so it takes several people just to set up one of them.

“Every year we get some inquiries from people in the community who want to come help volunteer, but it’s not the kind of work that really lends itself to that,” he adds. “Some of the lights and displays have their little ‘quirks’ that our regular staff knows how to handle from year to year, and of course there are safety issues too. No one takes care of something like the people who own it — so let us do the work, and just come out at Christmas and have a good time.”

This year’s Winter Wonderland at Sportsman Lake Park is now open and operates nightly through Christmas Eve. Though the train rides and Santa visits end after Christmas, the lights will remain on drive-through display through Dec. 30.

Visit the park’s website (cullmancountyparks.com/sportsman) for more on Winter Wonderland, as well as year-‘round information about everything Sportsman Lake Park has to offer.