Festival of Lights — Local services in Town of Hamburg

Since our family has relocated out of state, we’ve made visiting this event a yearly tradition when we are home for the holidays. The first couple years were great, but this year we noticed a significant decline in the number of vendors and activities. After driving through the same light displays as last year, we then entered the park and went to see Santa. There was a couple of characters, Cinderella and Spider-Man, wandering about to visit the kids in line. The line moved fairly quickly and they don’t rush the families, which is nice. After this, our experience gradually became more disappointing. We put the kids on a couple rides, and while we accept that these things are naturally a rip off, the workers could at least be friendly about snatching our money. The ride attendants had ear buds on, barely interacted with the people, and couldn’t spare an extra trip around the train track, when our kids were the only two on the ride. As far as things to see and good eats, there were a lot less concessions than in years previous, and the ice sculptures were replaced by some weird reindeer game stations, which were basically dulled out white boards to play tic tac toe. Further, we recalled a large fire pit in the center of the event, which has now been relinquished to a small gas burner in a gazebo that only holds a few people at a time. The final straw was the building that typically sells hot donuts and had a cute reindeer barn facade and some activities for the kids (one year they got to make their own reindeer food). Well, this was all undone by a railroad theme. On the positive side, our son loved the train sets that were showcased by two nice gentleman who seemed happy to interact with the kids. However, no donuts were to be found and “reindeer food” was some jingle bell craft with unfriendly attendants in a poorly lit corner. I like our tradition of attending and having special memories for our son with his grandparents, so I hope next year Hamburg figures out its situation and makes this worth the money spent and the...

Absolutely Horrible and Sad Experience. I really wanted to make this an enjoyable experience for my children and grandchildren. We waited over 2 hours in traffic and had arrived there early when the gates open at 5 pm. When you have 2 toddlers who are sitting in the car for that long and of course they had to go to the bathroom it made the experience very tiring. We had to let them get out and find a tree and its a bit harder with a girl. Other parents were experiencing the same issue. Some parents including our grandchildren just had to get out of the car and walk instead of sitting in the car which can be dangerous on McKinley road ! Once we got inside the gate they had only 1 woman checking the tickets for the drive through and 1 woman checking tickets for the full experience of the booths. Parking was terrible. Food only at 2 building and lines were very long. Plus 10.00 for any souvenir Is outrageous ! We didn't bother to even see the deers or Santa. By the time we got into seeing the lights after the two hour wait, finally found a park, let the kids go on two rides, and stood in the long line for some of the gross looking pizza, it was almost closing time. And again we were there when the gates open at 5 pm. It was hard to understand where everything was located inside as it was very spread out like it does for the fair. Which probably was a good idea in one sense due to the crowds but even the erie county fair has more people at the gates to see your tickets and is open during the week so as not to be so crowded. We have gone in years past and it was pleasant. I hope they consider not doing that route again and run it like the erie county fair. We won't be coming...

The coordinators for this event placed the entrance and exit points so they overlapped one another, and then neglected to have anyone directing traffic. The predictable result of this was gridlock. They then continued to admit more cars even after the gridlock had occurred.

The end result was that the wait to see this fairly mediocre ten minute light show was more than two hours, during which there was no way to exit the line and leave. This created a significant hazard both with traffic backed up into the street and with people stuck on the attraction with no way to get off. There were also no available bathrooms for an event that attracts large numbers of young children.

After nearly 20 minutes at a standstill, people began leaving their vehicles. One stated her daughter needed insulin and asked where there might be an exit, but there were none, as the organizers had made the decision to gate all side access roads, limiting any ability to exit the fairgrounds through more than the one exit point.

This could have been an absolute disaster had there been an emergency. Two nights before Christmas is absolutely expected to be busy, but there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of communication, poor coordination, and gating of emergency exits.

But hey, it's a great simulation of what it's like to be in bumper to bumper traffic on the way to your family holiday...