Each holiday season in Ponte Vedra, Nocatee-A-Glow draws thousands of Nocatee residents and their guests to the community’s Splash Waterpark for a two-night Christmas extravaganza featuring fun, food and festivities for the whole family. While the event gets bigger and better every year, for those who work behind the scenes to make the winter wonderland a reality, the work is all worth it.
“It’s great when you actually see it come together and realize you’re actually making a difference in the community,” shares David Ray, community manager of Nocatee. “The people come out and all the families are enjoying it, and it’s nice just to sit back and watch.”
Featuring a Christmas village, performers, a live nativity scene and more in addition to the main attraction — light shows synchronized to Christmas music — the event has something for everyone to enjoy. And although the two-night event is exclusive to Nocatee residents and their guests, Ray has good news for non-residents looking to take in the Christmas lights.
“We have the two-day event, and then the light and music show goes all month,” he says. “The two-day event is for Nocatee residents and guests. The light show that happens throughout the month is open to the public and it’s free.”
Last year’s Nocatee-A-Glow event had more than 5,000 attendees, and this year, staff are anticipating even more, thanks to the community’s continued expansion.
“Every year, there’s 3,000 more residents in Nocatee than there were in the previous year, so our events have to keep up with that in terms of size, in terms of expectations and just the way the community is growing,” Ray says, noting that Nocatee’s resident events are what attracts so many people to the community.
“I talked to a woman at one of our recent events,” he adds. “She said she’d recently moved from California, and that she chose Nocatee because she’d stumbled across some of our event videos and decided that Nocatee was the place she wanted to go, because we have such great community events.”
Nocatee-A-Glow is Nocatee’s biggest event of the year, and although it has become quite a spectacular display, according to Ray, it was born out of the humbler beginnings of a small tree-lighting ceremony hosted by The PARC Group, the developer of Nocatee.
“The first one was done in 2010 by the developer, and it was just a simple community Christmas tree in the parking lot of the Welcome Center,” he says. “There were only a couple hundred families even living in Nocatee at that time, so it was just a very small event. The community development district took it over in 2012.”
Instrumental in making Nocatee-A-Glow into the major production it is today was Nocatee Operations Manager Lee Hovis, who likens his enthusiasm for the Christmas season to that of Clark Griswold in the film “National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.” According to Hovis, Nocatee’s Christmas celebration evolved from a small tree-lighting to a lighting of the whole waterpark, and then eventually the idea to add music was born.
“One of our managers showed me a YouTube video, and being that I’m part Griswold, I loved it,” he says. “Someone had taken their house and had things moving with the music and trees lighting up, and we started researching it to see if it was something we could do.”
Fast forward several years, and now Hovis oversees the production of three musical light shows each year for visitors to enjoy: a traditional Christmas music show, a contemporary Christmas music show and a “Variety Spectacular” show.
What’s more, all programming, planning and construction for the shows and other festivities is done internally by Nocatee staff, and they waste no time in doing so.
“The Monday after the Nocatee-A-Glow weekend, we start planning for the next year,” Hovis advises. “Then we meet at least once a month and discuss other things we can do, or research things, so we’re not rushing at the last minute. The event staff here will go ahead and book Santa right away, for example, because getting a good Santa is super critical.”
But even with all the changes over the years, the roots of Nocatee-A-Glow are still celebrated every year with a nod to that first tree-lighting ceremony in 2010, as visitors gather around a tree made of Christmas lights to take in the twinkling, flashing and strobing lights synced perfectly to a soundtrack of Christmas joy.
“It started off with a very simple concept, the lighting of the community Christmas tree, and for as big and bright and spectacular as this is, it still begins with the lighting of the community Christmas tree,” Ray says. “And watching thousands of residents gather around there, it’s great to just blend into the background and listen.”
Nocatee-A-Glow will take place this year from 6 to 9 p.m. on both Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. The first night’s event will be open to Nocatee residents only and the second night will be open to residents and their guests. Non-residents may view the community’s synchronized light shows from 6 to 10 p.m. throughout the month of December, with a new show beginning every half hour.
