If you want to enjoy Christmas nearly every day of the year, head for Frankenmuth, Michigan. The city is north of Flint and southeast of Saginaw. That’s the home of Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland, a complex that covers 45 acres and contains more than 50,000 trims and gifts.
Bronner’s started in 1945 when Wallace “Wally” Bronner started working as a sign painter after school. The business has grown steadily over the years, becoming, as Bronner’s Lori Libka puts it, “the ultimate Christmas experience.”
That experience is demonstrated by 350 decorated trees in the salesroom and approximately 100,000 lights outside lining the half-mile long Christmas Lane leading to the store. The company says all of the light sets sold in a single year would stretch about 530 miles!
For the people who can’t get to Frankenmuth, Bronner’s uses FedEx and FedEx SmartPost to ship thousands of products. Mike Laux, with Bronner’s for 42 years, said the shipping department is “very, very busy” during the holidays. They usually ship more than 3,000 packages each day, and that total climbs to 4,000 on some days. This time of year, they can fill a tractor trailer every day, six days a week.
With 76,000 FedEx SmartPost items and 26,000 other FedEx shipments going out in a year, that’s a lot of Christmas decorations.