page_title: Holiday World & Splashin' Safari
section_title: Opening to 1954
hierarchical_section_title: Holiday World & Splashin' Safari / History / Santa Claus Land / Opening to 1954
caption_attribution_description: English: Future President of the United States Ronald Reagan visiting Santa Claus Land (now Holiday World &amp; Splashin' Safari) in 1955. Santa Jim Yellig is to the left of Reagan, while park founder Louis Koch is to the right of Reagan.
context_page_description: Holiday World & Splashin' Safari is a combination theme park and water park located near Interstate 64 and U.S. 231 in Santa Claus, Indiana, United States. The theme park is divided into four sections that celebrate Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July with rides, live entertainment, games, and attractions.
  Holiday World contains three wooden roller coasters: The Raven, The Legend, and The Voyage, as well as Thunderbird and The Howler. The safari-themed water park includes the world's two longest water coasters, Wildebeest and Guinness World Record Holder Mammoth; additionally, it contains a launched dueling water coaster named Cheetah Chase, numerous family raft rides and water slides, two wave pools, a junior-sized wave pool, two children's-sized water slide areas, a lazy river, and two family "tipping buckets".
context_section_description: Santa Claus Land opened on August 3, 1946. At no cost, the park offered a Santa, a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant and themed children's rides, one of which was The Freedom Train. With the park's success, Louis Koch's son, William A. "Bill" Koch, Sr., took over as head of Santa Claus Land. In the following years, Bill Koch continued to add to the park, including the first Jeep-Go-Round ever manufactured, a new restaurant and a deer farm which was eventually home to fourteen European white fallow deer.
caption: Future President Ronald Reagan visited in 1955
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