Louisiana Lights
Burden Museum and Gardens
Baton Rouge
Through Dec 30
Residents of Baton Rouge often bemoan the lack of things to do in the city, but as a reviewer of live events, I can confidently say you just need to know where to look…and money.
Across the city, Baton Rouge has lit up with holiday celebrations and light experiences from Nutcracker performances to holiday concerts to art displays. Many of these experiences can be prohibitively expensive, especially because ticket prices stack up.
Take the Louisiana Lights, one of the biggest light displays in the city. Tickets are $24.76 per person above the age of 4. In this context, one has to ask, is this worth it?
The Louisiana Lights opened last year after years of development with a mile and a half of over 360,000 twinkling lights. The displays are set up in themed areas with different styles of lights set to music. The path is wheelchair accessible, packed gravel and includes lots of Instagram worthy photo spots. It takes between an hour and and an hour and a half to walk through.
They were sold out most nights last year, but this year it’s possible (though sometimes difficult) to buy tickets the night of. The displays are beautiful, and lights are wrapped intricately around large trees.
A blue-themed light display transforms a portion of the garden into a winter wonderland with glistening trees that look straight out of Disney’s “Frozen.” Another shows two sheep across the lake in front of large lit Christmas trees. That’s not to mention the frequently photographed lit-up swings or giant light tunnel.
All in all, the experience was fun, but what Instagram doesn’t show you is that a large portion of the mile and a half loop has only minimal lights along the path. People, rightly, take photos of the stations with the most over-the-top lights. That obscures the reality that most of your time is spent walking between these displays on a pleasant but not especially impressive path with single colored lights projected onto the trees and minimal twinkling lights.
The music is varied in genre and style, and you can tell you’re in a different zone because of the change in music. This can be overwhelming at times since the winding path means you can sometimes hear multiple zone’s music at once. At one point I was hearing Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” at the same time as a rendition of “Joy to the World” fit for a church service. But once you’re firmly in a zone, you can buy into the theme, and the music contributes to the ambiance.
The price makes the experience hard to recommend. On a broad scale, I’ve noticed a trend that event tickets at the $25ish mark prices people out of Baton Rouge events. This makes sense given that 51 percent of the residents in East Baton Rouge Parish can’t afford basic living costs, sometimes despite being full-time employed.
Say you go to Louisiana Lights with a family of four or you go on a date night with dinner then the lights. You’re easily spending $100 for a night out even if you don’t buy anything inside the light experience. (Hot cocoa, glow sticks, alcohol are all for sale at several points within the loop.) That’s a quarter of rent for some people. Obviously, that’s not the Louisiana Light’s fault, and maybe given their popularity, they’re not incentivized to lower their prices to attract even more people. But as is, I couldn’t help but wish for a little more bang for my buck.
