The Christmas Casino & Inn recently opened in Cripple Creek, Colorado. The former Imperial Hotel, which housed Big Jim’s Gambling Hall and Saloon, was purchased by Full House Resorts, the parent company of Bronco Billy’s Casino and Hotel, in 2016.Full House spent $1 million and six months renovating the building, which had been operating as an antique shop and bed-and-breakfast since Big Jim’s closed in 2014. Full House Chief Executive Officer Dan Lee said, “Cripple Creek doesn’t need more slots, it needs more people. We hope to show that attracting more people to town is good for everybody. I hope the Christmas Casino doesn’t steal business from other casinos, but grows the market, instead, by giving people an additional reason to come here.”
Lee said the property, the first new casino in Cripple Creek in more than a decade, will feature a Christmas theme year-round. It will offer about 900 slots and table games and add a fifth restaurant, Rudy’s Diner, to the current four dining options.
Full House operates another Christmas-themed casino in Indiana. Lee said the company purchased the Cripple Creek property because the owner of the land Full House needed for a parking garage asked Lee to buy all of his holdings in the area. “I didn’t want to just reopen the Imperial Casino, so we had this Christmas-themed casino part of the year in Indiana and I thought it would work year-around in a mountain setting like this,” Lee said. He added, “We’ve been working on this for about a year and three of us went to Germany last December to visit the Chriskindlesmarkt in Nuremburg, the biggest Christmas market in the world, to get ideas.”
A significant portion of the casino’s décor was designed by mechanical display artist Lou Nasti, who has worked with Macy’s and the Park Avenue Plaza in New York City. The interior features a 17-foot Christmas pyramid with five tiers of traditional rotating scenes, a 15-foot rotating Christmas tree, a 360-yard garland with more than 4,000 ornaments, 9-foot nutcrackers and 30 cuckoo clocks. The historic hotel reopened with 12 rooms.
The new casino is the first part of a Bronco Billy’s expansion, which eventually will include a 150-room hotel, spa, parking garage, convention and entertainment space and an upscale restaurant. Lee said competitor Triple Crown Resorts’ lawsuit recently was dismissed, challenging the city of Cripple Creek’s approval of Full House’s expansion plans. Construction of the parking garage will start early next year and the new hotel will open in late 2020.
