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Coming Soon

25 Gathering

71 days away

San Diego Bay Parade of Lights 2026

Dec 13 – Dec 20, 2026 San Diego Bay, Shelter Island Shor…

For two evenings in December the water itself becomes the light show. Boats of every size — kayaks up to yachts — move in slow procession out from Shelter Island, through the harbor, toward the Embarcadero, while more than a hundred thousand people find a patch of shoreline to watch them pass. It has been happening since 1971, and the crews take it seriously: weeks of rigging, inflatable displays, themed structures built to win a judged category against neighbors they will see all year. Because the route runs the length of the bay, half the waterfront is a good seat. Free viewing along Shelter Island Shoreline Park, Harbor Island and the Embarcadero fills early, so come well before the start with blankets and something hot. Two Sunday evenings, both of them worth it. Take the kid who still believes, and the adult who forgot they used to.

San Diego Parade of Lights — Mission Bay 2026

Coming Soon

14 Gathering

71 days away

San Diego Parade of Lights — Mission Bay 2026

Dec 13, 2026 Mission Bay Park, 2581 Quivira Ct,…

The first boat comes around the point and its reflection doubles on water so still it looks solid, and the whole shoreline goes quiet at the same moment. That is what people come back for, year after year, and nobody ever quite manages to describe it right afterward. The fleet runs from kayaks strung with a single line of lights to yachts carrying installations somebody spent a month building. The protected bay is what makes it work — flat water holds the reflection and doubles everything, so the display is twice the size it actually is. December, after sunset, free from any public stretch of shoreline: Marine Park Way, Vacation Road, the shoreline parks, the beaches in front of the resorts. Come before dark to claim a spot on the route. Bring the person who insists they hate the holidays. Watch their face when the first one comes around.

NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet — Jacobs Music Center, San Diego

Coming Soon

73 days away

NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet — Jacobs Music Center, San Diego

Dec 15, 2026 1245 7th Ave, San Diego, CA 92101

You felt it the first time as a child — the moment the overture swells and the stage dissolves into a world where tin soldiers march and snowflakes dance in formation. That feeling never left. It just went dormant, waiting for a December evening dark enough to wake it up. NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet brings America's largest touring Nutcracker production to Jacobs Music Center on December 15. This isn't a local ballet company doing their annual recital. This is an international cast of dancers, acrobats, and puppeteers transforming Tchaikovsky's score into something that moves between classical ballet and spectacle — larger-than-life puppetry, costumes that seem to generate their own light, and aerial work that belongs in a Cirque show. The production has been touring for over a decade and has become a December institution in every city it touches. Jacobs Music Center sits at 1245 7th Ave in downtown San Diego, the same hall where the San Diego Symphony plays. The acoustics are built for orchestral music, which means Tchaikovsky's score fills the room the way it was written to. Doors open at 6 PM, showtime 7 PM. All ages. This is a Tuesday night in mid-December. The work week is winding down, the holidays are close enough to feel, and San Diego's evening air carries just enough chill to make a velvet seat in a warm concert hall feel like exactly where you're supposed to be.

Daily

90 Gathering

74 days away

Las Posadas at Olvera Street 2026

Every day · Next Dec 16 Olvera Street, 845 N Alameda St, L…

Somebody knocks on a door and is turned away. Then another door, and another. That refusal is the point of the whole ritual, and standing in a candlelit crowd singing it out loud in Spanish does something that reading about it never will. For nine nights before Christmas the procession winds through the oldest marketplace in Los Angeles, candles and images of the Holy Family carried by people whose families have done this on this street for more than a century. When the last door finally opens, the night turns over: food, music, and the pinatas, which is where the children take the evening away from the adults completely. Seven-pointed stars packed with fruit and candy, a blindfold, and everyone singing the song that tells you how many swings you get. Olvera Street beside Union Station, easy on the Metro, free and open to anyone who arrives by dusk. Bring somebody who got turned away from something this year.

118th Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade 2026

Daily

15 Gathering

74 days away

118th Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade 2026

Every day · Next Dec 16 Marina Park, 1600 W Balboa Blvd, N…

A hundred decorated boats light up Newport Harbor, and the entire shoreline turns into a stadium nobody sold tickets to. The Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade is one of the oldest and largest holiday boat parades in the country — 118 years of vessels strung with lights cruising past waterfront homes that are competing just as hard from the land side. Fireworks on opening night December 16 and closing night December 20. Five nights of the kind of spectacle that makes you understand why people buy boats they can't afford. Best free public viewing at Marina Park and along the Balboa Peninsula. December 16-20, 2026, nightly at 6:30 PM. Best public viewing at Marina Park, 1600 W Balboa Blvd, Newport Beach, CA 92663. Free to watch from public areas along Newport Harbor. This is the holiday event you send to the person who thinks they've already seen every Christmas tradition. They haven't seen this one — not from the water.

Daily

12 Gathering

75 days away

The Lion King — Hollywood Pantages

Every day · Next Dec 17 From $79 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

The lights go down, one voice starts, and then the animals come up the aisle right past your seat — close enough that somebody behind you gasps out loud and does not apologize for it. That opening has undone a hundred and ten million people and it has not gotten old once. Julie Taymor's puppetry, masks, and costume work are the reason. There is genuinely nothing else in touring theater that looks like this, and no amount of the film prepares you for what a person operating a giraffe at full height does to a room. The songs everybody already knows are all here, alongside material written for the stage by Elton John, Tim Rice, and Hans Zimmer. A long winter engagement on Hollywood Boulevard, performances most days with matinees, and the Metro stops right outside. For a lot of families this is the holiday tradition. For a lot of kids it is the first live theater they will ever see. Be the person who takes one of them.

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

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75 days away

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

Every day · Next Dec 17 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Some traditions survive only because a grandmother refused to let them lapse — the same seats every year, the same held breath when the tree grows and grows and the whole stage tilts toward wonder. That is what waits inside the San Diego Civic Theatre this December, when Golden State Ballet gives the city its Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky's score is a piece of collective memory by now; you know the Waltz of the Flowers before the first note lands, and still it catches you. Live orchestra, a corps that trained all year for these nine performances, the Sugar Plum Fairy suspended for one impossible second at the top of a lift. For a child, it is the first time the theater feels like magic instead of a place adults go. For everyone else, it is a way back to that first time. The show runs December 17 through 23, evenings at 7:30pm and weekend matinees, at the Civic Theatre downtown. Bring the kids you have, or the kid you were.

Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2026 — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Coming Soon

16 Gathering

75 days away

Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2026 — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Dec 17, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

December leaves gaps in people. You notice them in the car, or standing in a parking lot at night, and no amount of mall music fills them, because mall music was never trying to. This is the annual show that does. Smooth jazz and holiday arrangements played by a bandleader who brings friends every year, and the friends are always the kind of players who make you sit up straighter without knowing why you did. The room does work too — a theater from 1924, ornate plaster overhead, acoustics from an era when a hall had to carry sound on its own. The lobby fills with people dressed up for the first time since Thanksgiving. The Balboa Theatre downtown, doors at 6:30 PM, show at 7:30 PM. This is the show your parents take you to the first year you are old enough to appreciate it, and the show you take them to the first year you realize they need it. Do not wait for the second one.

50th Annual Parade of Lights & Fireworks 2026 — Ventura Harbor Village

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76 days away

50th Annual Parade of Lights & Fireworks 2026 — Ventura Harbor Village

Dec 18, 2026 Ventura Harbor Village, 1583 Spinn…

Cold air, dark water, and a line of boats coming around the breakwater covered in more lights than any of them need. There is no practical reason for any of it, which is the entire reason it has survived fifty years. Ventura Harbor does this on two nights every December and 2026 is the fiftieth, which means there are people in the crowd who came as children and are now bringing grandchildren to the same stretch of dock. Festivities open at four with carnival rides and live entertainment around the Village; the boats themselves start at six thirty, and fireworks close it out by eight. The local knowledge: get there well before the parade, because the two hours beforehand are the actual event for most families — the harbour in the blue hour with the rides going and the boats staging out past the jetty, visible but not yet lit. Then the lights come on all at once out on the water, and every year the same sound goes through the crowd. Friday, December 18 and Saturday, December 19. Festivities from 4 p.m., parade at 6:30 p.m. Ventura Harbor Village, 1583 Spinnaker Drive.

Daily

26 Gathering

76 days away

Jungle Bells at the San Diego Zoo

Every day · Next Dec 18 Included with admission San Diego Zoo, 2920 Zoo Dr, San Di…

Animals settling in for the night while families in scarves walk past on paths strung with light — the Zoo after dark in December turns into something out of a storybook, and the mild San Diego chill somehow makes it more convincing rather than less. Carolers. Cocoa. The happy chaos of small children who have been promised both. What makes it work better than it should is the timing: come at dusk and you catch the animals still awake and moving before they settle, then stay while the lights blink on across the canyons one section at a time. It is the rare seasonal outing that genuinely lands for a toddler and a grandparent on the same evening, and it is included with regular admission, which removes the last excuse anyone had. Pack warm layers and take your time with it. Some December traditions you inherit and some you start on purpose. Start this one with the people you would most want beside you in the dark.

Coming Soon

77 days away

Rave Jesus - Rave Revival Fall Tour

Dec 19, 2026 $20 Teragram Ballroom, 1234 W 7th St, …

Nobody warns you that leaving a faith community costs you the music too. You can walk away from the doctrine and still catch yourself, years later, missing the specific physical fact of a room full of people singing the same thing at once with their eyes shut. Rave Jesus is the strangest possible answer to that, and it works. Hard dance production under genuinely earnest worship writing, played to a room that is half people who never left and half people who did. The all-ages door matters here in a way it does not at most shows — it means the fifteen-year-old who came with the youth group and the thirty-year-old who has not been to church in a decade are on the same floor. Twenty dollars in advance is club-night pricing for something that behaves more like a revival. Whatever it is, it is not cynical, and that is rare enough to be worth the drive. Saturday, December 19. Doors 7 p.m., show 8. Teragram Ballroom, 1234 West 7th Street. All ages.

Coming Soon

77 days away

Svdden Death

Dec 19 – Dec 20, 2026 Nova SD, 454 6th Ave, San Diego, C…

Metal kids who discovered dubstep did not stop being metal kids. They just found a genre where the drop does what a breakdown used to do, and the crossover has been quietly one of the largest in American youth music for a decade. Danny Howland built Voyd out of exactly that overlap — riffs, growls, and a stage persona borrowed wholesale from black metal iconography, applied to bass music. The crowd headbangs rather than dances, and the pit behaves like a metal pit, which genuinely confuses people who wandered in expecting a club night. A week before Christmas in the Gaslamp, which means the room will be full of people home from school with nowhere to be in the morning. Saturday the nineteenth of December, doors at ten.

Coming Soon

78 days away

Los Angeles Rams vs. Dallas Cowboys

Dec 20, 2026 SoFi Stadium, 1001 Stadium Dr, Ing…

There is no such thing as a Cowboys road game and there never has been. Whatever the standings say in December, that star shows up in numbers no other visiting team manages, carried by people who have never been to Texas and inherited the thing from a grandparent who watched them on national television every Thanksgiving of the 1970s. Expect the building to be genuinely split, expect the away crowd to be loud early, and expect the home end to take it personally, which is exactly the condition under which a late-season afternoon becomes memorable rather than merely attended. This is week fifteen, which in most seasons is when the arithmetic stops being hypothetical and every result starts changing something. The 1:25 window means you are out of Inglewood before dark with the rest of a Sunday still available. December 20. If you have been waiting all year for the one with an edge on it, this is that one.

Pentatonix: Christmas in the City Tour — Viejas Arena, San Diego

Coming Soon

78 days away

Pentatonix: Christmas in the City Tour — Viejas Arena, San Diego

Dec 20, 2026 5500 Canyon Crest Dr, San Diego, C…

Pentatonix made a cappella cool by refusing to pretend it was anything other than what it is — five voices, no instruments, and the kind of vocal arrangements that make audio engineers ask how. The Christmas in the City Tour is the annual holiday tradition that fills arenas with people who came for the harmonies and stay for the moment when the bass drops lower than any amplified kick drum and 12,000 people feel it in their chest. At Viejas Arena the holiday setlist gets the full production treatment: lights, staging, and the kind of vocal precision that makes auto-tune feel like an insult. The Christmas catalog alone would fill a show, but Pentatonix weaves in the hits from every era — because a group that can make Daft Punk sound like a hymn does not need to stay in one lane. Bring the family. The kids will be amazed. The adults will cry. Both reactions are correct. Sunday, December 20. 6:00 PM. Viejas Arena, 5500 Canyon Crest Dr, San Diego.

Pasadena Holiday Tournament of Roses House Tour 2026

Coming Soon

10 Gathering

84 days away

Pasadena Holiday Tournament of Roses House Tour 2026

Dec 26 – Dec 30, 2026 Pasadena, CA 91103

Everyone watches the floats roll down Colorado Boulevard on New Year's morning. Almost nobody sees the wire skeleton underneath, or the volunteers on scaffolding placing individual flowers by hand in the cold days beforehand. The Decorating Facilities Walk gets you into the barns while the floats are half-finished, which is the only state in which you truly understand them. Every surface is organic material, seeds and petals and bark, glued on one piece at a time until an image resolves out of it, and the more of that process you watch the more absurd and moving the finished parade becomes. The association behind all of it has been running the parade since the eighteen-nineties, and its house on Orange Grove opens for tours as well. Pasadena in December, in the last weeks before the first, tickets through the association. Go once and you will never watch the parade the same way again. Take whoever watches it with you every year.

Coming Soon

85 days away

Las Vegas Raiders vs. Tennessee Titans

Dec 27, 2026 Allegiant Stadium, 3333 Al Davis W…

Nobody flies in for the last home game of the year. That is precisely what makes it worth going to. The week between Christmas and New Year is the dead zone of the football calendar, the tourists have gone home or are too hungover to leave the hotel, resale prices sink to the lowest they will be all season, and the people who show up are the ones who were always going to show up: season-ticket holders in the same seats they have sat in since the building opened, a scattering of families using the afternoon as an excuse to leave the house, and not one person there because it is an event. There is no spectacle attached. The concourses are walkable. You can hear individual voices instead of a wall of noise, which is rarer at Allegiant Stadium than you would think. Sunday, December 27, a 1:05 start. Of all the football you can buy this year, this is the cheapest, and it is the closest the place ever gets to feeling like a neighbourhood.

Rose Float Decorating at Rosemont Pavilion

Coming Soon

86 days away

Rose Float Decorating at Rosemont Pavilion

Dec 28, 2026 $20 Rosemont Pavilion, 700 Seco St, Pa…

Every rose on every float has to be put there by a person, one at a time, by hand, in the three days before the parade. That is not a charming fact — it is a logistical emergency that happens every single year, and it is why the barn doors stand open to anyone who wants to walk in and look. Inside, the smell hits first: wet flowers and glue and cold concrete. Volunteers on scaffolding press petals into wire mesh. Someone is on their knees gluing seed by seed into a dragon's eye, because the rules say every surface must be natural material, which means beans, bark, coconut, ground coffee. The floats are enormous and unfinished and look like nothing from the ground, and then you find the photograph of last year's version and understand what you are watching get built. Pasadena and Irwindale sites, December 28 through 30, nine to five. Wear shoes you do not mind ruining.

Enuff Z'Nuff, Pretty Boy Floyd, The Throbs

Coming Soon

86 days away

Enuff Z'Nuff, Pretty Boy Floyd, The Throbs

Dec 28, 2026 $33+ Whisky a Go Go, 8901 W Sunset Blvd…

The week between Christmas and New Year's has no shape to it. Work is theoretical, the leftovers are on their fourth appearance, and somewhere in a closet there is a shoebox of ticket stubs from when you were seventeen and the Sunset Strip was the center of the known world. Nobody in your house wants to hear about it again. Here is a room full of people who want to hear about nothing else. Three bands who were actually on that Strip when it meant something, stacked on one bill on a Monday night, in the club where most of it happened. Enuff Z'Nuff still play the Chicago power-pop that got them filed under hairspray for thirty-five years. Pretty Boy Floyd have never once apologized. The Throbs open. What the regulars know: the floor here is small enough that the stage monitors bleed straight into the crowd, so you end up hearing the show roughly the way the singer hears it. Doors swing at six on Monday the 28th; the room is upstairs off the Strip.

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