10 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Camp Counselor LONNIE HANZON IS THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING. BY TONI TRESCA Camp Christmas began in 2019 as a 10,000-square-foot immersive, maximalist Christmas fever dream featuring an explo- sion of lights, ornaments and holiday puns, created by the immersive pioneer Lonnie Hanzon in partnership with the DCPA’s Off-Center. Roughly 70,000 people streamed through Stanley Marketplace in that fi rst year, proving that Denver was hungry for something stranger, brighter and more theat- rical than a traditional holiday lights display. In the years since, Camp Christmas has taken many forms: an online edition during the pandemic, two seasons as an outdoor camp at Lakewood Heritage Center, and a return to Stanley Marketplace in 2023 for a sprawling indoor-outdoor hybrid. And then last year, the entire glitter-covered enterprise picked up and moved to Dallas. “It sucked,” Hanzon says now. “Dallas wasn’t good. It wasn’t a positive experience. We did a beautiful job in Dallas. We were right in the middle of downtown and we built everything in tents outside the AT&T Per- forming Arts Center and the Opera House. It was beautiful, but I’m very, very happy to be home.” If Camp Christmas has proven anything (beyond the general suckage of Dallas), it’s that immersive work survives only by mutating. That’s why the 2025 edition, the seventh Camp Christmas since its inception and the most ambitious yet, looks nothing like the original. This year’s extravaganza, which runs through December 28, transforms the entire Stanley Marketplace — three floors, the hangar, the breezeways, the bars and the outdoor spaces — into a giant, decentral- ized holiday playground. Much of it is free to explore, with only the brand-new Camp Christmas Express, a fi fteen-minute im- mersive “emotional car wash,” requiring a $10 ticket that you buy at the door. “It’s bigger than 2019 or 2023, when we’ve previously done Camp Christmas here at Stanley Marketplace. And the nice thing is, most of it’s going to be free,” Hanzon notes. “Immersive work has to keep on con- stantly changing,” he adds. “The audience changes. The market changes. The whole sustainability of it changes. We have a to- tally different fi nancial model on this one, this time to make it all work. We are very much getting supported by Off-Center and DCPA for marketing and ticketing for the Express, but I’m banking this myself. There’s a partnership, but it’s not the normal process. So what we did is we set up deals with the Stanley, and then we set up deals with the retailers, the bars, all of it.” Scanning the Camp Christmas setup, Hanzon adds: “You know, this is sort of like the school play. It’s everybody getting involved to just make this happen, and I just think it’s the nature of the beast. If you’re going to do cutting-edge work, you have to stay very, very fl exible to fi gure out how to make it work.” That fl exibility extends to a shift in Camp Christmas’s long relationship with Off-Cen- ter, which co-created the show in 2019 and helped incubate Denver’s immersive arts boom. Earlier this year, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts shocked the local scene when it announced that it would step back from producing original immersive work through Off-Center. “I can’t help but be sad that Off-Center doesn’t want to do original immersive work anymore,” Hanzon says. “But immersive is not dead. It’s still in its infancy. And, honestly, it’s not a model that necessarily works well with large organizations. The DCPA — and I have said this to them — they are an orches- tra, they are a phenomenal orchestra, but we play jazz. We don’t play without rules. We still have our own rules, but it’s just different. It’s always building the plane while it’s in the air. It’s very diffi cult for large organizations to be able to do that.” Still, the DCPA remains involved with the ticketing, marketing and, most important, sending Off-Center co-founder executive director and curator Charlie Miller, who is departing the DCPA next March, to assist with this year’s Camp Christmas. “Camp Christmas wouldn’t exist this year without Charlie Miller,” Hanzon says. “Charlie Miller is a force. He’s the com- municator and the connector. He puts all the people together, and he helps keep me on my toes. That’s what a great producer does. I’ve always had my art career, and I’ve always had my Christmas career, and Charlie was the one who said, ‘Put them together.’ Charlie is the biggest support that we’re getting from DCPA.” To help make up for the loss of producing support from the DCPA, Stanley Market- place is fully leaning in. “Everybody at the Stanley knows what happened to the build- ing historically when Camp Christmas was here,” says Ally Fredeen, special projects manager for Westfi eld Co., which co-owns and manages the Stanley. “How many people are attracted, what happens to the numbers and what happens to the whole energy of the space, so they’ve bent over backwards to help us.” The result is a takeover that stretches across every corner of the marketplace. Out- side, visitors fi nd a Colorado-style welcome sign, Grandma’s Tree and the iconic camp school bus photo op. Inside, three bars are re-themed for the season: The Local Drive has been transformed into the Camp Christ- mas Bar; Denver Biscuit Company is now the Santa Bar (lined with “a few hundred or maybe even a few thousand Santas”);,and Traveling Mercies is the Winter Pearl Bar. The Merry Badge Scavenger Hunt expands to all three fl oors, pairing each of its twenty badges with an appropriate business, like the Beauty Queen badge at the salon. Each badge sheet includes one underlined word; collect all twenty to form a secret story and redeem it at the Camp Christmas gift shop for a prize. But the most audacious addition is the Camp Christmas Express. Modeled on a car wash, the walk-through experience moves guests through six emotional “cycles,” all designed to shake off the year and rebuild holiday spirit. Guests begin by choosing a piece of “emotional baggage” and shredding it under a “let it go” sign. From there, the rooms escalate: a pink “Pre-Soak,” a station with pun-forward sanitizer brands, a breath- ing chamber scented with oak, and the De- partment of Roar, where guests scream into a device that measures their roar on a scale from “cowardly lion to Simba to whatever across fi ve levels.” The fi nal rooms – scrub, wax-and-seal and fl uff-and-buff – lead to a mirrored refl ec- tion space where guests choose a seasonal intention, such as “I will be present” or “I will let the magic in,” to get people into a seasonal headspace before exiting through the Camp Christmas gift shop. “The whole thing this year is that it’s been a crappy year,” Hanzon says. “We want you to let it go, roar it out and then step out tuned up with holiday spirit.” Free visits with Santa – including Asian Santa, Black Santa, Bilingual Santa, Mx. Claus, ASL Santa and Sensory Santa – will be available every weekend from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. through December 21. With Camp Christmas adding its amenities to 55 busi- nesses, Fredeen anticipates large crowds. “At the Stanley, we see over 100,000 people easily in December, and that should overfl ow into Camp Christmas,” she says. “Camp Christmas may very well benefi t from the natural traffi c that the Stanley gets and receives, especially this time of year, from people wanting to support and shop small this holiday season. I think there is a real rise, a real demand, for people wanting to shop small this year, so we might see an increase in traffi c from that this year.” For Hanzon, who had about twenty peo- ple building Camp Christmas this year, the return is both a reinvention and a restoration. “Frankly, the best place we’ve ever done our work is here,” he said. “I’m very happy to be home.” And beneath the glitter, comedy and chaos lies something more enduring: continuity. “This is my fortieth Christmas,” Hanzon says. “I started doing this in Cherry Creek. The world changes, but the demand for this always returns. Somebody says that Christ- mas is going to be canceled every year, but we’ve been doing this for 1,200 years. I don’t try to place any bets anymore, but I hope this works. We’re not doing timed entry. You buy tickets at the door. It’s $10. We’ll see if this decentralization thing works. Denver is an incredibly competitive holiday town, but Colorado has always come out.” Camp Christmas runs through Sunday, Decem- ber 28, at Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas Street, Aurora. Learn more at stanleymarket- place.com. CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Camp Christmas is now at the Stanley Marketplace through December 28. COURTESY OF CAMP CHRISTMAS
