First-Plymouth Church is hoping to send a message of making the best of an unusual holiday season with a drive-by display.
The church put together "Love Looks Like This," a holiday display open to the community that started Friday and will run nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. through Christmas Eve.
The entire church will be lit, and life-sized puppets will roam a forest of lit trees. Actors will portray Mary and Joseph and other figures of the Nativity. A beam of light will shine on the baby Jesus’ manger as a representation of hope and light, the Rev. Jim Keck said.
“It’s just purely a Christmas gift to the wider community,” he said. “A sense of joy and magic during a time that’s so hard.”
Friday night, cars circled the display just after 6 p.m. The church's windows and the trees surrounding it were colorfully lit and animal puppets, including a camel, sheep, giraffe and donkey, were scattered around the grounds.
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Drivers could also tune into a radio broadcast to hear music and a description of the display.
"As you come near the forest this night and see the lambs and the giraffes and the donkey, we are celebrating creation itself," Keck said in the broadcast.
The event is free, but donations are being collected for Cedars Home for Children.
“Children in peril really fits the Christmas message to be there for the most vulnerable, those most in need,” Keck said. “So we're hoping this event will raise some serious money for Cedars.”
First-Plymouth normally packs about 4,000 people in the church for a series of Christmas Eve services, but it became clear over the summer that this year’s plans would have to be adapted, Keck said.
Keck said the event was initially going to be a walk-through event, with the display set up inside the church, but it was adapted into a drive-by event as the pandemic worsened.
"I'm disappointed that we lost the walk-through," he said. "But we're just doing what we can."
Putting the display together included involvement from other local groups. Theatrical Media Services of Omaha was responsible for lighting the church, and actors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are performing. Keck said the event offered an opportunity for the groups, which have been struggling during the pandemic.
“There's a lot of people involved in this that we're able to pay at a time that they don't have work,” Keck said.
While First-Plymouth is a Christian church and celebrates Christmas as the birth of Jesus, the church wants the celebration to be open to the larger community, Keck said.
“We're wanting to send love to people of all faiths,” he said. “We want this to also just feel like love beyond any one religion.”
Keck said the wider theme of the event has been focusing on the positive and what's possible, instead of lamenting what the pandemic has prevented.
“We could all just mourn what we're losing this Christmas, but we decided to go the other way — what kind of special thing we could create,” he said.
GREAT CHRISTMAS LIGHTS: