Camp Christmas began in 2019 as a 10,000-square-foot immersive, maximalist Christmas fever dream featuring an explosion of lights, ornaments and holiday puns, created by the Denver immersive pioneer Lonnie Hanzon in partnership with the DCPA Off-Center. Roughly 70,000 people streamed through the Stanley Marketplace in that first year, proving Denver was hungry for something stranger, brighter and more theatrical than a traditional holiday lights display.
In the years since, Camp Christmas has taken many forms: an online edition during the pandemic, two seasons as an outdoor camp at Lakewood Heritage Center and a return to the Stanley Marketplace in 2023 for a sprawling indoor-outdoor hybrid. And last year, the entire glitter-covered enterprise picked up and moved to Dallas, an experiment that Hanzon is very honest about.
“It sucked,” Hanzon says. “Dallas wasn’t good. It wasn’t a positive experience. We did a beautiful job in Dallas. We were right in the middle of downtown and we built everything in tents outside the AT&T Performing Arts Center and the Opera House. It was beautiful, but I’m very, very happy to be home.”
If Camp Christmas has proven anything, it’s that immersive work survives only by mutating. That’s why the 2025 edition, the seventh Camp Christmas since its inception and its most ambitious yet, looks nothing like the original.
“Immersive work has to keep on constantly changing,” Hanzon says, walking through the venue, still mid-construction. “The audience changes. The market changes. The whole sustainability of it changes. We have a totally different financial model on this one, this time to make it all work. We are very much getting supported by Off-Center and DCPA for marketing and ticketing for the express, but I’m banking this myself. There’s a partnership, but it’s not the normal process. So what we did is we set up deals with the Stanley, and then we set up deals with the retailers, the bars, all of it.”
Hanzon scans the work-in-progress and adds, “You know, this is sort of like the school play. It’s everybody getting involved to just make this happen, and I just think it’s the nature of the beast. If you’re going to do cutting-edge work, you have to stay very, very flexible to figure out how to make it work.”
That ethos shapes this year’s return, which runs November 21 through December 28 and transforms the entire Stanley Marketplace — three floors, the hangar, the breezeways, the bars and the outdoor spaces — into a giant, decentralized holiday playground. Much of it is free to explore, with only the brand-new Camp Christmas Express, a fifteen-minute immersive “emotional car wash,” requiring a $10 ticket you buy at the door.
“It’s bigger than 2019 or 2023 when we’ve previously done Camp Christmas here at the Stanley Marketplace, ” Hanzon says. “And the nice thing is, most of it’s going to be free.”
It also marks a shift in Camp Christmas’s long relationship with the DCPA Off-Center. The nonprofit arts organization, which co-created the show in 2019 and helped incubate Denver’s immersive arts boom, announced earlier this year it would step back from producing immersive work.
“I can’t help but be sad that Off-Center doesn’t want to do original immersive work anymore,” he says. “But immersive is not dead. It’s still in its infancy. And, honestly, it’s not a model that necessarily works well with large organizations. The DCPA — and I have said this to them — they are an orchestra; they are a phenomenal orchestra, but we play jazz. We don’t play without rules. We still have our own rules, but it’s just different. It’s always building the plane while it’s in the air. It’s very difficult for large organizations to be able to do that.”
Still, Off-Center remains present in other ways, such as handling ticketing for the Express, sharing marketing support and, Hanzon believes most importantly, sending co-founder, executive director and curator, Charlie Miller, who is departing Off-Center in March 2026, to assist with this year’s Camp Christmas.
“Camp Christmas wouldn’t exist this year without Charlie Miller,” Hanzon says. “Charlie Miller is a force. He’s the communicator and the connector. He puts all the people together, and he helps keep me on my toes. That’s what a great producer does. I’ve always had my art career, and I’ve always had my Christmas career, and Charlie was the one who said, ‘Put them together.’ Charlie is the biggest support that we’re getting from DCPA.”
To help make up for the loss of producing support from the DCPA, the Stanley Marketplace is fully leaning in. “Everybody at the Stanley knows what happened to the building historically when Camp Christmas was here,” says Ally Fredeen, special projects manager for Westfield Co., which co-owns and manages the Stanley. “How many people are attracted, what happens to the numbers and what happens to the whole energy of the space, so they’ve bent over backwards to help us.”
The result is a takeover that stretches across every corner of the marketplace. Outside, visitors will find a Colorado-style welcome sign, Grandma’s Tree and the iconic camp school bus photo op. Inside, three bars are re-themed for the season: The Local Drive becomes The Camp Christmas Bar; Denver Biscuit Company becomes The Santa Bar (which will be lined with “a few hundred or maybe even a few thousand Santas”); and Traveling Mercies becomes the Winter Pearl Bar.
The Merry Badge Scavenger Hunt expands to all three floors, pairing each of its twenty badges with an appropriate business, like the Beauty Queen badge at the salon. Each badge sheet includes one underlined word; collect all twenty to form a secret story and redeem it at the Camp Christmas gift shop for a prize.