A holiday horror show is on display in a new exhibit at the Tampa Bay History Center.

There are delinquent Santas and multiple lawsuits. A hundred-foot-tall tree. At least three million pounds of shaved ice masquerading as snow, which “melted almost immediately” during a November heatwave.

And that’s just a fraction of the chaos that erupted during the notorious Tampa Snow Show of 1958.

Holiday Traditions in Florida, a traveling exhibit from the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, is at the Tampa Bay History Center until Feb. 2. The display showcases Florida traditions from Epiphany to Emancipation Day.

And this holiday season in Tampa, visitors get a new addition that’s stranger than fiction.

“At Christmas, we celebrate the winter holidays a little bit differently, because we don’t make snowmen and Santa’s wearing a tropical shirt,” said Rodney Kite-Powell, director of the Touchton Map Library and Florida Center for Cartographic Education at the Tampa Bay History Center. “We thought, ‘we have to have a special thing that we put together ourselves that highlights the Snow Show.’”

The midcentury event was dreamed up by advertising executive Howard Hilton, who worked for the Maas Brothers department store and wanted to get shoppers into downtown Tampa.

“He remembered these really great winter festivals and winter carnivals growing up in Connecticut, and he thought, ‘Well, a lot of the people who live in Tampa, they’ve never seen snow. So what if we brought snow to downtown?’” Kite-Powell said.

He dreamed up the Tampa Snow Show as an eight-day holiday spectacular. The St. Petersburg Times would go on to call it “the most flawed spectacle in Tampa history.”

“Even though hundreds of thousands came to the show, it resulted in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer and several sunburned seals,” wrote one reporter in 2003.

Hilton found the source of the flurries in the phone book. City Ice Co., which provided ice for local shrimp boats, offered free 300-pound blocks of ice. All the owner asked was for his daughter to model in the publicity materials and be “named queen of the snow show.”

Trucks from the company pulverized the blocks and placed the shavings along Tampa’s Franklin Street.

November temperatures that year soared to the high 80s, killing the winter wonderland atmosphere and transforming the ground ice into mush.

Hilton also wanted to display the world’s tallest Christmas tree, something “bigger than the White House,” Kite-Powell explained. The first tree he ordered — a 100-footer — snapped in half before the train it rode on could make it out of Minnesota. A bulldozer carrying a replacement tree “sank in a quagmire and couldn’t be retrieved until spring,” the Times reported.

A third tree finally made it to Florida and was nestled in a hole on Franklin Street. The plant was so heavy that it pushed through the earth and burst a sewer line.

“Raw sewage starts bubbling up out of the ground, all over the street, all over the lower branches of Christmas tree,” Kite-Powell said.

Hilton beat himself up over it in his autobiography, writing: “Unaccountably (and I thought, undeservedly), people started giving me dirty looks as the odious, repugnant glop slurped relentlessly over gutters onto sidewalks.”

At an ice skating show, a spinning performer sliced open a woman’s forehead with her skate. Others were arrested for chucking ice balls that shattered store windows.

Both Santas hired by Maas Brothers committed crimes. One stole precious jewelry from the department store. The other told each child who sat on his lap, “Anything you want, kid, your dad or mom will buy it at Maas Brothers.”

Parents were not pleased.

Some Tampa Tribune readers wrote in with complaints, from “You can’t make snow balls of cracked ice” to “It was such a mob that it actually frightened me.”

“Even the police couldn’t control everyone. Where were all the children’s parents?” lamented one reader. “Ice was flying freely and I covered my 1-year-old’s head as best as I could until we could get out of range.”

Others were delighted.

“At the age of 24 I have never seen snow and it was all I could do to keep from running barefooted down the middle of our ‘snow bank‘ when I saw it glittering so beautifully in the sun,” wrote one woman. “My little boy was so thrilled with the snow he wanted to take a snowball home and put it in the freezer.”

To kick off the festivities, Kite-Powell said, organizers crafted a five-story ramp for a Norwegian ski jumping champion to slide down.

“The night before they opened the ceremonies, a bunch of (University of Tampa) students got on it and knocked all the ice and snow off,” he said. “So it was just bare chicken wire the morning of the opening. But the skier went down it anyway and wrecked at the bottom.”

Others were injured while attempting to race down in toboggans. The Tampa Bay History Center’s exhibit includes photos, advertisements and lawsuits that stemmed from the disaster.

“It’s like this movie you can picture in your head, this great comedy playing out,” Kite-Powell said. “But it was anything but comic at the time to Mr. Hilton.”