Luke Marsden: Honour to host event that switches on the Christmas spirit in our town

Not that Wigan Council are using the word Christmas in any of their marketing for the ‘Winter Frost Festival’.

As you are probably aware dear reader, I likely have a Guinness world record for the most consecutive local town Christmas light switch-on events.

I probably hosted and attended 10 in a row before I decided to hang up my microphone and pass the baton to other prominent Wiganers such as Hacker T Dog.

It remains a true career highlight to have seen the joy in thousands of Wiganers faces upon counting down to the big Christmas light switch-on over the years in our town centre.

The events over time have had less headline acts such as Busted and more Ray Quinns of the world, which based on time and budget is ok – you do the best you can with what you have got.The problem we have is there is not enough lights to cover the town centre and the ones that do go up have seen better days. I think they are older than most Wiganers.

The point of the Christmas light switch-on/Winter Frost Festival/big red button push is to bring together Wiganers from all walks of life, to cheer up the ones who are having a hard time or won’t be able to have their own Christmas light switch-on in their homes.

When the fake snow blasted out of the cannon and Mariah’s epic Xmas hit pumped through the speakers, we knew that Christmas was just around the corner and for those few moments we could put our troubles aside and pick the fake snow out of our hair.

As I mentioned earlier, it remains a true honour for me to have hosted and switched on my hometown Christmas lights and I hope those that have the pleasure of doing it this year know that they aren’t just flicking on some LED snowflakes, they are switching on the Christmas spirit of our town, even if they can’t say the word!