Official Atlanta Georgia Christmas Lights Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Official Atlanta Georgia Christmas Lights Awards is and who runs it

The Official Atlanta Georgia Christmas Lights Awards is a public-vote holiday contest run by Big Red Bulb, a Christmas-lights platform that operates on its own site at bigredbulb.com. The ballot lives on the community contest leaderboard, and the page footer carries a copyright by Christmas Lights Near Me LLC, which appears to be the corporate name behind the platform. This is not a newspaper readers-choice ballot or a chamber of commerce program; it is a contest built around Big Red Bulb's own map of decorated homes.

The 2026 ballot is titled the Official Atlanta Georgia Christmas Lights Map Holiday Contest 2026, and it sits over a community described as featuring 58 holiday displays. The market is Atlanta, Georgia, and the award groupings printed on the page reach across the metro area rather than stopping at the city line, which is why the program name pairs Atlanta with Georgia.

Big Red Bulb hosts this ballot on its own domain, so supporters vote straight on the leaderboard with no outside voting site sitting in between. Everything a voter needs, from the award list to the displayed window, is printed on that one page, which also makes it the only place to check for changes between cycles.

The dated record: the 2026 edition and its voting window

The confirmed edition on this ballot is the 2026 contest. The page's own evidence points both forward and back: the masthead carries the 2026 Holiday Contest title, and the printed stretch of November 28, 2025 to January 5, 2026 shows the platform running a full holiday voting season the year before. The organizer describes the awards as annual in its own words, calling them a showcase of Atlanta's brightest holiday displays.

For the current cycle, the ballot evidence prints a voting stretch between Saturday, November 28, 2026 and Tuesday, January 5, 2027, and the leaderboard is recorded in its voting phase with a window covering November 2026. That gives supporters roughly five and a half weeks to place their votes, running through the heart of the holiday lighting season and a few days past New Year.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Some information stays off the ballot entirely. There is no published statement of how entries are nominated, no printed day-level opening rule beyond the window itself, and no announcement of a 2027 cycle. The organizer's leaderboard is where any of that would first appear, so a supporter planning around next season should watch that page rather than assume the same dates repeat.

How a supporter votes on the Big Red Bulb leaderboard today

The mechanic is simple and printed directly on the ballot. The page states that users can vote once per individual awards and once across the overall window, and the ballot is addressed to all Big Red Bulb users. In practice that means a supporter signs in with a Big Red Bulb account, browses the 58 holiday displays in the community map, and places a single vote under each of the 8 awards they care about.

The award groupings follow county lines. The page prints Best of groupings for Fulton County, Cobb County, Forsyth County, Cherokee County, Dekalb County, Gwinnett County, Douglas County and Hall County, so a display in Marietta-adjacent Cobb competes in a different grouping than one in Forsyth. The page also notes that displays can win multiple awards in this contest, which matters for supporters: voting for one decorated home under several awards is a valid use of the per-award allowance.

Two practical notes follow from the printed rule. First, repeat voting on the same award is not part of the design, since the allowance is once per award, so helping a display means sharing its listing widely instead of returning to the same button. Second, the second overall-window vote is separate from the per-award votes, so use both if you want to spread support across the community. Any finer-grained rule about accounts or households is not stated on this ballot, so follow the live page.

How this ballot sits beside Georgia's other best-of contests

Georgia's public-vote scene splits into two very different kinds of ballot, and this program belongs to the smaller, platform-native side. Big media readers-choice programs such as the Best of Atlanta from Atlanta magazine, Best of Cobb from Cobb Life Magazine, and Best of Forsyth from Forsyth County News run on large category rosters with business nominations across dozens of fields. The Christmas Lights Awards instead covers one narrow subject, decorated homes, over a community of 58 displays.

That difference changes how support works. In a readers-choice ballot a business can mobilize customers across many categories; here a household's support is concentrated on a single listing, and the once-per-award rule means reach among Big Red Bulb users is what moves a display up the leaderboard.

The seasonal timing also separates it from its neighbors. Programs like the Athens Community's Choice Awards, Best of Augusta, and Best of Middle Georgia run their windows on their own calendars, while this ballot is pinned to the holidays, opening in late November and closing in early January.

For a voter, the practical takeaway is that these programs do not compete for the same vote. A supporter in the Atlanta metro can back a local display here and still take part in a citywide readers-choice ballot, since the organizers, platforms and windows are entirely separate.

Strengthening support for a display on this ballot

Because the rule is once per individual award, the real advantage in this contest is audience, not repetition. A display owner or supporter gets the most from a single early push: share the display's leaderboard listing with neighbors, local social groups and holiday-light tour pages while the window is young, and remind Big Red Bulb users you know that each of them can vote under every one of the 8 awards, not just their favorite category.

No statement from Big Red Bulb about outside voting help or bulk voting appears on this page, so the display owner should read the contest terms on the live leaderboard before pursuing anything beyond organic outreach, and follow whatever the organizer prints there. General, contest-neutral tactics for widening a support base, from timing your ask to writing shareable listing copy, are covered in our guide to getting more votes online, and award-specific advice sits at buy award votes. Neither page changes this ballot's rules; the leaderboard remains the authority for this community of 58 displays.