Plano, Texas Welcomes Water Lantern Festival for the first time and illuminates downtown pond

As the sun continued to set into the evening, hundreds of cube shaped paper lanterns lit by a small yellow LED candle on the inside, gently floated across the pond creating a golden hue along the shore. Each lantern uniquely decorated with various colored markers and sent away with different intentions from its owner. The scene at the park during the launch looked straight out of a Disney movie, more specifically the floating lantern scene in “Tangled”.

“It's an experience you won't forget. And it just helps you feel good and helps you get closer to the people that you come with.” Water Lantern Festival Coordinator, Cameren Weaver, said.

The Water Lantern Festival made a stop in Plano, Texas at Haggard Park during their international tour. The festival that started in 2018 is a community event where guests can come together, decorate lanterns, and apply their own personal meaning to the experience.

“My intentions were to write down my hopes for the future and to draw some doodles that would look cute and represent a bit of my personality,” Lewisville resident and Water Lantern Festival attendee, Abigail Holt, said. “I wanted the lantern to be very sincere and from the heart.”

Every year the festival makes its way to 200 locations around the world across 6 different continents with a million in attendance. Included in the ticket is a floating lantern, commemorative drawstring bag, LED light, marker, conversation cards, playing cards, and a wristband. Tickets can be purchased online in advance at a discounted price or on the day of at the check-in tent for $55.99.

The doors opened at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 10. There was a modest crowd sprinkled throughout the park made up of friend groups, couples, and families. During the evening an hour or two before 8 p.m., more guests started to flow in and set up camp on the grass pavilion surrounding the pond.

Guests can bring their own blankets, chairs, food and anything else they need to brave the Texas heat before sundown. The only thing they can’t bring are their own lanterns.

Before the lantern launch there was a variety of live entertainment, activities, local food trucks and vendors for guests to explore. Many people could be seen throughout the park decorating their lanterns, eating food, exploring the question cards, shopping, and walking around.

Taste of Seoul, Leo’s Kitchen, Heavenly Eatery, Zahra Henna Design, Plano Psychic, LC Cakepops, and more set up shop at the event. For live entertainment, a ukulele player performed songs. There was one activity where people in the audience were instructed to text one person in their phone letting them know that they love and miss them.

At 8 p.m., some people spoke to the crowd about why they were there and what it meant to them. The speeches were then followed by a guided meditation played on a speaker to help everyone reflect and focus on what they are releasing their lantern for. After the meditation, instructions were given and people were free to release their lanterns into the water at 8:30 p.m.

People attend the festival for a myriad of reasons.There is no cultural significance to the festival itself and attendees get to apply their own personal meaning and elements of their culture to the experience.

“We like to bring hope, peace and joy into our festivals, and that's kind of what we stand for,” Water Lantern Festival Public Relations Coordinator, Helen Blodgett, said. “A lot of people come to our events with different reasons. Whether they're dedicating their lantern to someone or they're just there to have a good night with friends or family, it can be a night people use for many different reasons, and I think that's why it's so beautiful.”

There’s a team of festival coordinators that research and travel to cities where they want to have the event in. They are looking for cities that have been experiencing growth recently and have venues with bodies of water suitable for the lantern launch.

Plano has 85 parks and 98 miles of trails according to their website. Haggard Park was selected as a venue for the event because of its close proximity to downtown, walkability and shape of the pond.

“It's very intimate, but it has a lot of space for the event. So it's really a perfect location.” Events Permit Coordinator for the City of Plano, Adrienne Young, said. “We try to limit larger events to a certain number of parks in the city so that normal park goers can just enjoy the parks the way they are, instead of encountering large groups of people.”

The Water Lantern Festival is also a supporter of Water.org. They are a nonprofit organization that provides access to safe water for communities in need around the world. Water sustainability is another focus of the organization as well.

Included in the ticket price, along with the water lantern kit, is a $5 fee that goes towards cleaning up the park after the event. The small pond has a narrow part in the middle with a bridge over it that funnels out into the other section of the pond. This makes cleanup easier and aligns with the festival’s water sustainability initiative.

“We're huge into recycling our lanterns,” Blodgett said. “Once the lanterns are put onto the water, we actually collect them all with a buoy at the end of the night, and we recycle the material. And so we've been able to partner with Water.org and part of our proceeds go towards them.”

In addition to that, the lanterns provided by the festival are “custom designed (US Patent No 10,711,959 B2)” as stated on their website. This means that they are designed to stay afloat without tipping or capsizing, even under windy conditions. This is another thing that helps make cleanup easier by making the lanterns less of a hassle to collect.

“I actually really advocated for when they reached out initially to apply,” Young said. “And the Park Department was very hesitant, and I was basically like, I really think this will be a really beautiful event for the city, and I think it'll be great for the community.”