We’re fully lit up for the season here at French Lick Resort, and around here, the lights stay on until January. We like to hang on to that holiday magic as long as possible.
All through our 50 Days of Lights celebration, you’ve got options when it comes to light-seeing. If you want to avoid winter’s chill, stay indoors and see the sights at our hotels. Admire the towering tree in the West Baden Springs Hotel atrium, and head to French Lick Springs Hotel to see it at its best and brightest. The tree in the lobby is obviously a must-see, and find plenty more trees dotting our hotel and Event Center this season.
To feel the full warmth of the holiday lights, you’ll want to step outside. The gardens at West Baden Springs Hotel are nothing short of magical. And the animated light show projected onto the exterior of French Lick Springs Hotel every night? That alone is worth making the trip to see.
Yep, we go big for the holidays. You could almost consider it following merry marching orders from the man responsible for reviving our hotels into what they are.
Bill Cook was famous for making his hometown sparkle at the holidays. He co-founded Cook Group, a medical device company up the road in Bloomington. Preserving historic buildings in Indiana was a side hustle, of sorts, for Bill and his wife Gayle and son Carl — if you can consider investing hundreds of millions of dollars to restore West Baden Springs Hotel and French Lick Springs Hotel a “side” venture.
Bill, who passed away in 2011, always looked forward to the Christmas season because it was an opportunity to make it special for others. In Bob Hammel’s book “The Bill Cook Story II: The Re-Visionary” there’s a great anecdote about this. Bill was highly involved in Bloomington “Canopy of Lights” which illuminated the city’s courthouse square each season. Jim Murphy, who helped oversee the annual lighting, recalls this exchange with Mr. Cook:
“Several years ago I thought I’m going to let Bill know how much he spends on decorations at Christmas time each year. So I did some checking and it is about $50,000 a year, including the lights and labor by Cook employees to put them up.
Originally we wrapped the trees with lights like you typically do at home, but a few years ago Steve Ferguson had been up to Chicago and seen how they wrap every branch and (Bill) said, ‘This year I want us to wrap every branch.’ So we did. There’s like 280,000 lights, 28 miles in length.
One night, I told Bill the cost of running the lights was about $50,000 a year. He gave me a look and said, ‘Scrooge! Bah humbug!’ (I said) ‘no, Bill, Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year. I just thought you might want to know how much you’re spending.’ He looked at me and he said, ‘You know what, Murph? We’re giving people something to smile about. I want to do more.’
I didn’t think about it until later, but that was the first Christmas after 9/11. And he made that statement: I want to give people something to smile about. Isn’t that beautiful?”
(Pictured here: Bill Cook and wife Gayle with Diane Sawyer after the reopening of West Baden Springs Hotel.)
Beautiful, indeed.
Bill Cook would love all this. Couples getting engaged in the beautifully lit gardens at Christmastime. Families making it an annual tradition to visit French Lick and West Baden to see the lights.
Inside and out here at the resort, you’ll find those familiar decorations you look forward to each year. And new ones you’ll see for the first time, because we love sprinkling in new features each year. When we began our 50 Days of Lights celebration years ago, we counted the strands and crunched the numbers — the sum was a half-million lights. Hard to put an exact number on it now, but safe to say it’s grown by the thousands as our resort lights up bigger and better every holiday season.
Bill is certainly looking down and smiling at our winter wonderland, knowing that it’s putting smiles on the faces of others.