Shak the Halls! Holiday Lights Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in Shak the Halls! and why the city runs it

Shak the Halls! Holiday Lights Contest is a December tradition owned by the City of Shakopee, the municipal government of Shakopee, Minnesota. It is not a media readers' choice ballot and not a commercial platform contest. The city invites its own residents to nominate decorated homes, publishes a map so neighbors can tour the displays, and then lets the community decide the winners on the city's Facebook page. The contest page lives on shakopeemn.gov under resident services, alongside other city-run community programs.

The audience is local by design. Every nominated entry is a residence in Shakopee, and the supporters who matter are the people who can drive past the displays and vote for the house down their own street. That gives the ballot a neighborhood character that statewide best-of programs cannot copy, and it explains why the city keeps the whole thing free, from entry through voting.

Facts at a glance

For readers comparing municipal programs with the bigger Minnesota ballots, the closest relatives are the state's readers' choice contests, which work on a much larger scale and answer to publishers rather than a city hall.

The dated record: editions, windows and past winners

Three editions of the contest are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each has run in December, and the city treats the program as a recurring part of its holiday calendar. The 2025 cycle is the most fully documented. Entries opened Friday, Nov. 21 and closed at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 18, with nomination of a residence free to submit. Voting then began at 9 a.m. Friday, Dec. 19, 2025 and ran through 9 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 23, with winners announced once the voting period concluded.

The contest page also keeps its honor roll. The 2024 winners were Andrew Jacobson of 969 Atwood St. S. in first place, Roy and Lilian Simmons of 2004 Norton Drive in second, and Josh, Monica and Brodey Rosckes of 1110 Quincy St. in third. The 2023 first place went to Roger Schmidt and Lis Griffith of 921 Shakopee Ave. Publishing full street addresses of winning homes is unusual among public-vote programs and underlines how local this ballot is.

What the city has not printed on the contest page is a list of judging categories or any prize schedule, so the shape of the 2026 round should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. A 2026 edition has not been announced yet either; the city's contest page and Facebook account are where the next call for entries will appear first.

How a supporter votes in the current cycle

The mechanic asks little of anyone. A supporter starts on the City of Shakopee's contest page at shakopeemn.gov, which carries the season's instructions and the map of nominated displays. From there, voting happens on the city's Facebook page, where the nominated homes are presented for the public vote. The city caps each person at a single daily vote, so anyone hoping to carry a particular display should plan to return every day the window is open rather than voting once and forgetting about it.

Because the ballot sits on Facebook, the practical requirement is a Facebook account. The city's own website remains the authoritative source for dates and rules, and the Facebook page is only the place the vote is collected. That split is worth understanding before the season starts: the contest page tells you when voting opens and closes, and the Facebook page is where the button actually is.

Nothing about the process costs money. Entry is free, voting is free, and the city imposes no fee at any stage. The daily return is the whole game here. A display whose supporters vote consistently across the full window has a real advantage over one whose fans vote once and forget, because the per-day limit multiplies every committed household into several votes.

How this ballot sits beside Minnesota's other public votes

Minnesota runs a busy calendar of public-vote programs, and Shak the Halls! is the most local of them. Where the big readers' choice ballots cover whole regions or the entire state, this contest covers a single city and judges something you can see from the curb. Its organizer is a government rather than a newspaper, its host is the city's own site plus Facebook rather than a contest platform, and its subject is homes rather than businesses or professionals.

Its closest relatives on this site are the state's best-of programs. Minnesota's Best and Best of the Midwest run broad category ballots across large audiences, while CommunityVotes Rochester and CommunityVotes Duluth apply the nominate-then-vote model to their own cities. The Brainerd Lakes area has Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area, and Duluth also carries the Duluth News Tribune's Best of the Best.

What makes Shak the Halls! different is scale and season. It is a single-subject ballot with a short window, a per-day vote limit and a winners list printed with street addresses. A supporter strategy that works here, daily returns from a tight circle of neighbors, looks different from the broad outreach a statewide category ballot rewards, and the two should not be planned the same way.

Strengthening support for a Shakopee display

Because each person may vote once daily, the strongest campaigns in Shak the Halls! are built on repetition, not reach. A nominated household should tell its street, its school community and its family group chat the moment voting opens, then remind those same people each morning until the 9 a.m. close on the final day. Sharing the display's photo directly from the city's Facebook post shortens the path for every supporter.

The organizer's own framing matters here. The City of Shakopee publishes a plain per-day limit and nothing about outside assistance, so the safe assumption is that votes should come from real people voting genuinely, one day at a time. Anything that inflates the count without real supporters behind it sits outside the spirit the city has printed, and a municipal program can disqualify an entry it believes abused the ballot.

Anyone weighing outside help for a community ballot should read our guide to earning more votes first, and check the legal and rules overview before spending anything. For this contest specifically, a yard sign and a daily reminder text beat every shortcut on offer.