SkyPark at Santa's Village

Glenn Holland read a Saturday Evening Post piece about a Christmas park in upstate New York and decided the Rim of the World wanted one. He was a Crestline man. The ground belonged to the Henck family, who leased him 230 acres; Putnam Henck, known as Putty, was the general contractor, and the trees cleared off the site were milled and built straight back into the log cabins that went up on it. Santa's Village opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1955, with reindeer, a miniature train, storybook cottages and elves at work on toys. Disneyland opened six weeks later.

What happened next is the reason to remember it. Holland was a friend of Dick and Maurice McDonald, who had just brought Ray Kroc into the business at their stand down in San Bernardino, and it was their idea that convinced him to franchise. He built two more, at Scotts Valley in 1957 and East Dundee, Illinois in 1959, which gives Santa's Village a fair claim to being the first franchised theme park in the country. A chain of Christmas, run on a hamburger stand's logic.

The chain went bankrupt in the 1970s. The Skyforest park outlived it because the Hencks owned the ground underneath and simply took it back, and they ran it until 1998, when it closed for good. The rides were auctioned, the wiring was pulled out, and the cottages stood behind a locked gate for the better part of twenty years.

Bill and Michelle Johnson bought it and spent years getting 1955 construction up to code, putting a sawmill back on the property and cutting replacement timber from the site itself, the way Henck had. It reopened on December 2, 2016 as SkyPark at Santa's Village: cottages restored, and around them roughly ten miles of purpose-built mountain bike trail, ziplines, archery, climbing, a fishing pond and a skating rink. The route of the old Bumble Bee Monorail now carries a pedal-powered rail ride.

Admission is priced by date and sold ahead. November and December are the park at full Christmas, and also the traffic.