Frankenmuth — Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland is the world’s largest Christmas store. That isn’t just a marketing boast. The store is massive, more than two square acres, with a thoroughfare inside running half a mile long. They have so many lights plugged in that their electric bill runs thousands of dollars per day.
Bronner’s presents Christmas as an overwhelming consumer spectacle, but it’s so grandiose that you can’t deny the Christmas cheer. If you think the holiday has become too commercial, then this isn’t the place for you.
The voluminous parking lot greets you with an astounding array of statues, lights, Christmas trees, little stars, and flags. It’s the only thing you can see for a long stretch of M-83 south of Frankenmuth.
It clues you in immediately to the shock-and-awe marketing ethos of Bronner’s, which is to dazzle you with immensity of scale. The largest Christmas store, the most ornaments sold, the most trees cut—every line is a boast of enormousness, and it’s all true.
Outside, Bronner’s is adorned with a variety of international flags. They claim a sort of Christmas universality akin to protestant evangelism. Christmas worldwide, for all peoples.
The founders of Bronner’s, the late Wally and his wife Irene, certainly saw their love of Christmas as integral to their Christian faith. Bronner’s has statues of Jesus all over the place and even spells Christmas as CHRISTmas, painted on almost every wall you can see.
Regardless of Christianity, Bronner’s is a place that promotes the holiday of Christmas above all. The holiday in all its spectacle and grandeur, unfiltered and in a spirit of total excess.
Inside, it’s a giant Christmas maze that you could easily lose yourself in. Rows and rows of endless ornaments, lit-up Christmas trees towering up to the roof. Aisles and aisles of baubles, toys, decor, accessories. A food court with sandwiches, pretzels, ice cream.
Colored lights everywhere as far as you can see, reflecting off the shiny ornaments. Christmas shopping as visual spectacle. Endless amounts of Christmas sights and objects to consume.
On the one hand, it’s incredibly overwhelming. The lights, the statues, the ornaments, the scale of the place. It feels hallucinatory, like a bad acid trip come to life somehow. You can’t believe a place like this is real.
On the other hand, it doesn’t feel disingenuous. Sure, it’s a store, they want to move merchandise and sell you products. But the sheer commitment to the bit has a way of making it all feel genuine. This is a place that really believes in what it’s selling.
It’s Christmas as a simulacrum, a synthesis of all of the signs and symbols of Christmas, something that becomes more than the holiday itself. The holiday distilled for consumption, formed into one massive store filled with endless tiny objects for your tree.
You can buy Christmas at Bronner’s. That’s the promise, in the end. That ineffable holiday spirit, the famed Christmas cheer, maybe you haven’t felt it in awhile, but here you can simply buy it, and in such quantities, scale and variety to make it undeniable.
This isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily. Perhaps underneath all the glitter and price tags there’s a virtue to it, after all.
Many bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, the focus on presents, on things, instead of matters of faith, or even the communal holiday spirit of goodwill. The trend toward a secular consumer Christmas is undeniable.
It’s right to want a more wholesome, genuine Christmas with a less materialist focus. To find that holiday spirit in the warmth of your family and friends and not in some giant lawn statue of Santa Claus.
Yet, we live in a physical, material world. The aesthetics we surround ourselves with shape our experience of reality. We can’t divorce ourselves from them entirely.
If we want Christmas to feel like Christmas, it needs to look like Christmas. That means trees, stockings, ornaments, and lights. The decorations matter, they set the tone of the holiday, we can’t deny they don’t.
Bronner’s understands this, and has it all for sale. You can hate the commercialism all you want, but the spectacle is necessary. Christmas simply wouldn’t be Christmas without the tree.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
