Harbor Holiday Lights: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Harbor Holiday Lights is and who runs it

Harbor Holiday Lights is a holiday home-decorating contest run in Gig Harbor, Washington by Gig Harbor Contests, an organizer that publishes community ballot programs on its own website, gigharborcontests.com. On the site the program also travels under the name Let It Glow, which the organizer calls Gig Harbor's annual Holiday Lights Contest, where local families go all-out to make the season shine. The page credits the effort as brought to you by What's Good Gig Harbor and Shameless Promotion.

The vertical is a community best-of format rather than a business readers' poll: the entries are decorated houses, the prize structure in the 2025 cycle was one overall winner, and the audience is holiday visitors touring the displays in person and then voting online. The ballot itself is a public-vote form on the organizer's own domain, with no third-party contest platform between the supporter and the vote.

Harbor Holiday Lights facts

The dated history for the Let It Glow ballot

Three cycles of Harbor Holiday Lights are confirmed by the organizer: 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2025 page describes the program as Gig Harbor's annual Holiday Lights Contest, and the organizer's site carries a 2026 copyright line, so December 2027 is the cycle to watch next. The one dated window the ballot page prints is the voting round: voting takes place between December 11th and 25th.

What the organizer has not printed is the run-up. No entry or nomination dates for Harbor Holiday Lights appear on the ballot page the way the December window does, so if you want to put a house on the route rather than vote for one, confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The 2025 cycle also settles how a season ends. The organizer kept things simple that year with one overall winner for 2025, and the page opened by congratulating the winning entry, House #1. That is the only announced result the site carries; how earlier cycles broke down their results, and how the 2026 vote resolved, is not stated alongside the window dates. What stays constant is the December anchor: every cycle the page describes is a short-and-spectacular holiday tour whose voting window closes on Christmas Day.

How a supporter votes for a house in December

The mechanic on the gigharborcontests.com ballot is deliberately plain. When voting opens between December 11th and 25th, the page announces that voting is officially open and tells you to check back to vote on your favorite houses. From there you scroll down to explore the listed routes of decorated homes, or map out your own holiday adventure through Gig Harbor, which makes the tour and the ballot two halves of the same evening.

Each house on the ballot is identified by a number and a street address. To vote, you enter the number matching your favorite on the form; the organizer's instruction is to enter a number from 1 to 7, so the ballot in the published cycle carried seven house entries. The rule that governs the submission is stated in one line: one vote per person will be accepted. There is no mention of daily returns, runoffs or bracket rounds; the 2025 cycle explicitly used one overall winner.

Because the form takes a single ballot per supporter, the effective strategy for a host is reach rather than repetition: make sure every person who tours your display knows your house number before they leave the curb. Results are posted back on the same page after the close, as the 2025 congratulations shows, so the ballot URL is the one address to keep through both the vote and the announcement.

Where this ballot sits among Washington state vote programs

Harbor Holiday Lights is a market-level community ballot, and it is not the only vote-driven program in Washington state. The state's best-of ballots include Best of 425 for Bellevue and the Eastside, Cascade's Best, Best of Clark County run through the Columbian, Best of Snohomish County from the Everett Herald, Best of Western Washington from KING 5, and the Best of the Best Northwest Readers' Choice from the Seattle Medium. Those programs name businesses and services across broad regions; Harbor Holiday Lights names houses on a street map.

That difference drives everything about how it works. A best-of readers' poll spreads votes across many categories over weeks; the Let It Glow ballot compresses the whole contest into a December 11th to 25th window, seven numbered houses, and one overall winner. It also lives on Gig Harbor Contests' own site rather than a national contest platform, alongside the organizer's Halloween Contest page, so the same small publisher answers for both the ballot and the results. For a supporter, that means the December page is the single source for the route list, the house numbers and the announcement, with none of the separate nomination and voting phases the bigger state ballots run.

Strengthening support for your house on this ballot

Harbor Holiday Lights gives every supporter exactly one ballot between December 11th and 25th, so nothing you do can multiply your own vote; the only lever is how many distinct people choose your house number. Hosts on the route have a structural advantage worth using: the ballot itself sends voters past your display. Print or share your house number with anyone who mentions visiting, since the form asks for the number from 1 to 7 and a visitor who cannot remember it cannot vote for you.

Timing matters in a window this short. A house that is lit and promoted from December 11th onward collects ballots across the full fortnight, while a display discovered on the 23rd gets one or two evenings of traffic before the Christmas close. The organizer's own framing supports this: it invites supporters to check back and vote on their favorite houses throughout the window. If you want a broader playbook for rallying real supporters to an online ballot, our more votes guide covers outreach habits that fit a one-vote-per-person contest. What it cannot do is change the arithmetic Gig Harbor Contests has printed: one supporter, one vote, one overall winner in December.