If you think your home’s Christmas decorations might earn Clark Griswold’s seal of approval, Rebecca and Thomas Goode definitely want it on their map.
The Sorrento couple is gathering names and addresses for the Shuswap Holiday Twinkle Trail, an interactive map pinpointing residential and business Christmas light displays in communities throughout the region.
“It could get really busy but that would be amazing if we could have that much participation,” said Rebecca.
The Goode’s created a template for the Shuswap Holiday Twinkle Trail map with their Halloween Candy map, something they did leading up to Halloween to help lessen the uncertainty of who might be participating in their community.
“We know there are lots of people who like to decorate for Halloween and we really weren’t sure how things were going to go because of the pandemic and lock downs, so we created a thing and it ended up doing really well and we thought, why don’t we try to gear it towards Christmas,” said Thomas.
“Our boys love going on rides to look at the Christmas lights, something we’ve done since they were both basically babies… There are lots of people with great displays around and we thought we’d try to make a way to have that accessible to the community.”
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The Goodes plan to go public with the map on Dec. 1, and said they would continue adding to it as more names and addresses come in.
“This year with COVID, more than any other year, people are just hoping to be connected and something like this really does that for people,” said Rebecca.
Rebecca explained only addresses are needed to be on the map, but she and Thomas thought including names would add to the sense of community.
The Goodes invite Shuswap residents putting up lights and decorations, and wanting to help spread some cheer, to send their name and address by email to thomas.goode@ig.ca, and “we will add your home or business to the Twinkle Trail.”
The Goodes Shuswap Holiday Twinkle Trail will be available on zeemaps.com.
The Observer also welcomes Shuswap readers to submit short videos of their Christmas light displays (with addresses) to newsroom@saobserver.net. The videos will be compiled into one and shared in a story with the Shuswap Holiday Twinkle Trail map.