FAIRBURY – Everything changes on this New Year’s Day, where a crew of locals and volunteers came to the Crystal Springs campground in Fairbury to begin to tear down the lights from this year’s holiday display – the first clear sign that the holiday season is in the past as the calendar formally flips to 2025.  

For the last few weeks, local families, groups and businesses had parceled out the land around the campground, constructing their light displays for the fourth installment of Christmas at Crystal Springs, which the organizing committee said was the biggest edition of the event yet.  

And now that they’ve got this event up and running, their goal is to continue to make it bigger and better every year going forward. New this year were long lines of lights strung alongside the unpaved entrance to the facility. Now, those lights must all be picked up, wrapped up, placed in trucks, and then escorted to the back of the campground.  

Waiting there is a new on-site storehouse the event organizers have been gifted by the city of Fairbury. It used to be the campground bathhouse, but those facilities were relocated to a different building a couple of years ago. And this year, an obsolete generator was removed from the old building, giving the Crystal Springs crew even more space for all of the lights, except for the corpses of the light displays that won’t survive to be part of next year’s display, less than 11 months from now.  

Once all the light displays are cleaned up and put away, the Christmas at Crystal Springs committee will get a little bit of time off before they begin the planning process for the 2025 edition of the event – because even though Christmas 2024 is now officially Christmas past, the next holiday season will arrive in no time at all.