College Park Deck the City Holiday Decorating Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Deck the City Holiday Decorating Contest and who runs it?

The City of College Park, the municipal government for the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, runs the Deck the City Holiday Decorating Contest through its community events calendar. The pitch on the city's page is disarmingly simple: "Do you love to decorate for the holidays? Well, get out all your bulbs, bows and reindeer" for a townwide competition. It is a seasonal contest for decorated homes and displays, decided by a public vote rather than a judging panel, and it belongs to the city government rather than to any publisher or media brand.

Every official touchpoint sits on the municipal website. The Deck the City page carries the contest details, the nomination form and a winners gallery from previous seasons, so a participant moves from reading the rules to submitting an entry without ever leaving collegeparkmd.gov. City Hall handles the program from 01 Baltimore Avenue, Suite 201, College Park, MD 20740.

Because the organizer is a city rather than a magazine, the tone of the ballot differs from the reader polls that dominate Maryland's contest scene. Recognition splits between a People's Choice track, driven by the public tally, and a Mayor's Choice track, and the winners are published as street addresses any resident can drive past during the season.

Which years has Deck the City run, and what happens in the 2025 cycle?

The city treats the program as a fixture of its December calendar: "The City's annual Deck the City Holiday Decorating Contest is back!" Confirmed editions fall in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. The earliest appearance surfaces in a city notice headed "Deck The City Holiday Contest," posted December 18, 2020, which makes 2020 the published starting point of the run.

The 2025 cycle unfolds in phases. Nominations opened at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, December 1, 2025, and the city accepts entries online between December 1st and 15th, with a cutoff of 11:59 pm on the closing night. Multiple entries from a single nominator are allowed. Once nominations shut, the submitted displays move to the City's Facebook page, where the public vote runs from December 16 through 18, 2025.

Results stay visible on the same municipal page. The 2024 winners gallery recorded:

The honorees are ordinary household addresses on College Park streets such as Rhode Island Avenue and Delaware Street.

A gap remains on the page itself: the roster of entry categories and the criteria behind the Mayor's Choice honor are not printed beside the nomination form; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does voting work in the Deck the City contest?

The vote happens off the municipal site entirely. After nominations close, City of College Park staff post the entered displays on the city's Facebook page, and that page functions as the ballot for the December stretch. The published rule is short: "One vote per person per day on the City's Facebook page."

That line drives the whole approach to backing an entry. A resident who wants a neighbor's lights to climb the standings plans a separate visit on each day the ballot is open, since a single session yields a single vote. The contest page attaches no device restrictions, login requirements or residency tests to the act of voting beyond that daily line, and it names no fee for taking part. There is no premium lane either: the city sells nothing that gives a display extra weight on the tally.

Practically, the structure rewards persistence over volume. An entry backed by a wide circle of households returning every day outpaces one backed by a larger crowd that shows up a single time and drifts away. Because the vote lives on a social page rather than a dedicated portal, seeing the entries requires nothing more than finding the city's page while the window is open.

How does Deck the City compare with Maryland's other public-vote contests?

Maryland's contest calendar is crowded with publisher ballots, and College Park's holiday program sits apart from all of them. The nearest named neighbours include Best of Baltimore from Baltimore Magazine, the Baltimore Style Readers' Choice ballot, Baltimore Sun's Best, the Baltimore's Child Readers' Choice Awards, Best of Annapolis from What's Up Media and Best of Frederick from the Frederick News Post.

Those programs share a shape: a publication invites its audience to rank businesses, services and institutions across a whole market, usually spanning many fields at once. Deck the City inverts the scale. Its subject is a single seasonal craft, holiday decorating, its jurisdiction stops at the College Park city line, and its organizer is the city government rather than a newsroom. The vote lands on a Facebook page instead of a publisher's polling tool, and the reward is civic recognition rather than a magazine feature.

For a searcher, the practical consequence is that these ballots rarely compete for the same attention. A Baltimore restaurant has little reason to campaign for a College Park yard-display honor, and a College Park household gains nothing from a place on a citywide reader list. Anyone mapping public votes across the state should treat them as separate tracks that happen to share a season.

What is the smartest way to support a display within the city's rules?

The binding constraints are the ones the city prints: a short December vote stretch and a cap that resets by the day rather than by the hour. The practical response is organization. Agree within a household on the display being backed, set a reminder for each evening the ballot is open, and make sure every adult who wants to take part casts the daily vote they are entitled to under the once-per-person rule.

Visibility matters just as much. Sharing the city's Facebook post through neighborhood groups and school communities reaches locals who would never browse the municipal site on their own. Anyone weighing outside assistance should start from the city's published limits and then read the general guidance at how to get more votes online; the considerations behind buying votes online only make sense once those limits are clear.