WHEELING — Look out for the number 40 on your drive through the Oglebay Winter Festival of Lights this year.

Oglebay Park — with some help from Santa Claus and WesBanco Market President David Klick — flipped the switch on Thursday night to mark four decades of holiday illumination there.

With the lighting came fireworks, then the first-ever drone show in the Ohio Valley courtesy of Sky Elements, a finalist on this year’s “America’s Got Talent.”

The drone show returns to the park for an encore presentation Saturday night. Oglebay officials suggest that for optimal viewing, visitors choose a spot near Wilson Lodge hillside facing Schenk Lake.

Parking is available at the Levenson Shelter area, Observatory Field and Upper Zoo parking lot.

The drones are projected to take off again around 6:25 p.m. Saturday.

Oglebay Foundation President and CEO Eriks Janelsins told those attending the Light Up Dinner about how the festival began.

“Over the last 40 years, more than 12 million guests have enjoyed the Oglebay Winter Festival of Lights,” he said. “Now it’s hard to imagine the park without the crowds of people lining up along Route 88 each December.”

He said it all started when Randy Worls, Oglebay Foundation Chairman Emeritus, and Ross Felton met for dinner in early 1984 to discuss how to drive people into the park and the community during winter months.

The park put together the first Festival of Lights that year for 30 days in December — and it rained each day, according to Janelsins. But 50 tour buses showed up anyway the first year.

“Lots of other communities have tried to do what we do, and they’ve failed,” Janelsins said. “They’ve tried to create something too big, and it came and it went.

“Here at Oglebay and Wheeling, we have this investment from our tourism partners, investment from the local media and the Chamber of Commerce, from our high schools, and from our corporate donor community. That investment only happens here at Oglebay.”

WesBanco has been sponsor of the Festival of Lights since 2016, he added.

Bob Peckenpaugh, president and CEO of the Wheeling Park Commission, is enjoying his fourth season guiding the park. Before coming to Wheeling, Peckenpaugh lived and worked at 14 different parks and resorts throughout the nation.

“This is beyond what I’ve seen everywhere else,” he said of the Festival of Lights. “Nothing I’ve seen elsewhere has been developed to this extent.”

Peckenpaugh noted he first interviewed for his job in December 2020 during COVID, but also the height of the holiday season at Oglebay. He enjoyed watching from his room at Wilson Lodge seeing the headlights of the cars going through the lights.

But on Saturday afternoon he went out to explore Wheeling, and didn’t realize the traffic jam he would encounter on his way back to the park. He said he joined the line of cars backed up along National Road in Woodsdale, and 90 minutes later arrived back at the lodge.

“I knew then that this event was special and exciting for the community,” Peckenpaugh said.

WesBanco’s Klick, a father of two young children, said the festival is very important to his family each holiday season. They often drive around Oglebay on Sundays after a Steelers game — sometimes with the children in pajamas — and stop for hot chocolate at the Levenson Shelter.

“We do a trip (around), sometimes two, and do that several times during the holiday season,” he added.