Take me out to the holiday lights

Before the mayor turns The Ted into a subdivision, another village of sorts has sprung up the stadium’s Green Lot.

It’s a global one, made of 480,000 square feet of silk, 50,000 pieces of china, 20,000 recycled plastic drinking bottles, 160 tons of steel and millions of twinkling LED lights. The Global Winter Wonderland is a lantern festival in the tradition of Chinese New Year events and is angling to become the latest holiday light tradition in the city.

The idea itself is a simple one: recreate some of the world’s most iconic landmarks as enormous, elaborate lanterns. When it is all alight, the result is fun, kitschy and dazzling in all the right ways.

Larger-than-life Bollywood-style dancers pose before a mammoth Taj Mahal. Across the park, a rendering of the White House looks amazingly sedate by comparison. Giraffes, lions, cheetahs and elephants roam an African plain, and tulips sprout in front of windmills in the Netherlands. A Mayan pyramid looks like an enticement for children to climb it (don’t let them, because their feet will rip right through the silk). There’s even a replica of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C., minus the controversial, now-banished inscription, of course.

“I was trying to recreate the childhood memories of the lantern festivals I saw in China when I was little,” said Lulu Hang, president of the International Culture Exchange Group, which developed the show. “And with this I’m trying to say that it doesn’t matter what your color or language is, we’re all children of the Earth.”

The show originated in Santa Clara, Calif., two years ago, before it was moved to Atlanta this fall. There are about 40 major lanterns in all, and the whole thing is set to a music track, which may or may not give you that it’s-a-small-world-after-all feeling. The show runs Nov. 21 through Jan. 5. On Nov. 28, the show expands to include the UniverSoul Circus, with performances Thursdays through Sundays. And if you can keep the little ones from trying to scale the replica of the Eiffel Tower, there’s a mini-amusement park on the grounds as well, complete with a Ferris wheel-type ride that gives you a bird’s eye view of this very bright, very loud, very colorful world.