Editor’s note: This story is being updated to correct the headline. (Updated 8:40 a.m. July 21, 2025).
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The city of Conway is known for elaborate decorations that cover its streets each time a holiday rolls around.
However, each year, those festivities come with a hefty bill.
Conway takes its celebrations seriously, even changing its name to City of Halloween for the month of October, when pumpkins and skeletons loom around every corner. Come Christmas time, the city becomes a twinkling beacon straight out of a Hallmark movie. And the decorating doesn’t stop at these major holidays — if there’s cause for celebration, Conway dresses itself up accordingly.
In the past three years alone, the city has spent more than half a million dollars on its decorations. These holiday expenses, which have increased in recent years, are an effort to attract more visitors to the city, but has it worked?
Year after year, putting up festive decorations requires a healthy dose of planning, effort and money. But the city believes it’s all worth it for the tourists it brings to town, and the joy it brings its year-round residents.
“Holiday decorations and events offer extra value to the quality of life our residents,” city spokesperson June Wood said in an email to The Sun News. “Over the last several years, the increased decor has correlated to increased foot traffic and in return more revenue for businesses.”
According to city expense reports shared by Wood, Conway has spent more than $100,000 in each of the past three fiscal years to make its holiday makeovers possible.
In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the city spent $116,391 on decorations. The following year, it spent $198,264 on decorations. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the grand decoration total came out to just over $229,712.
The holiday decorations are funded through the city’s “hospitality funds,” according to Wood. These funds are collected from city businesses rather than through taxes from residents.
Conway’s holiday decorating as it’s known today kicked off in 2019, when plastic jack-o’-lanterns were hung from the trees along Main Street. The festivities have continued to grow since then.
“I think that in 2019 it really started as more of a community-focused event,” Wood said in an interview. But in the first few years of decorating, Wood said she saw interest in holidays spent in Conway expand to a regional, and then a national scale.
According to the city’s seasonal visitation data, foot traffic has also grown over the years, particularly around Halloween and Christmas.
In 2019, Conway welcomed just under 150,000 visitors in October. In the past few years, the city has seen more than double that amount of tourists during the Halloween month, with more than 225,000 people stopping by in October 2024.
In December 2019, an average of 4,000 visitors strolled the streets of Conway each day, and about 8,000 visitors came to the city on average each weekend day. As of 2024, an average of just over 6,000 visitors came to town each day in December, with the weekend daily average jumping to almost 12,000.
Wood said in an email that the decorations have been a worthwhile endeavor for the city because they give people more reasons to visit the city, bringing in more business. Wood said in a later interview that the city has seen increases in its hospitality funds and city revenue since the decorating started, which opens up more possibilities, as these are the funds used to pay for the decor.
She also said that businesses have expressed that it has been a benefit to them as well.
In the past few years, Wood explained that the city has also started “dabbling” in other holidays, such as Valentine’s Day.
“We have found that with every new season our residents are excited for the next seasonal celebration and plan family events and vacations that will offer them additional activities,” she wrote.
Before decorating for holidays, Wood said that the city didn’t bring in much tourism. Aside from some people taking day trips to stroll along the Riverwalk, or families visiting Coastal Carolina University students, Conway didn’t experience much outside traffic.
While Wood said the city’s goal is not generating tourism, but rather making it a better place for residents to live, she noted that decorating the city has brought about a noticeable change in the number of out-of-town visitors.
For Conway, the community spirit and new revenue streams generated by decorating has been worth the cost, Wood said. The city has no plans to stop its festivities any time soon.