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Ebenezer Scrooge's BIG San Diego Christmas Show

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101 days away

Ebenezer Scrooge's BIG San Diego Christmas Show

Nov 24, 2026 $30+ Conrad Prebys Theatre Center, 1363…

Everyone knows the bones of A Christmas Carol (the ghosts, the chains, the redemption before dawn), which is exactly why the Old Globe's comic riff on it lands so well: a fast, funny, warmhearted reinvention set in a snow-dusted San Diego, where a small cast plays every role in a race to save Scrooge before Christmas morning. It is Dickens with the sincerity intact and the self-seriousness stripped out, the kind of holiday theater that works whether you cry at the ending or come for the jokes. Ebenezer Scrooge's BIG San Diego Christmas Show runs November 20 through December 27, 2026, in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre at the Conrad Prebys Theatre Center in Balboa Park. Bring the family, pair it with the park's holiday lights, and start a new December tradition. Warm, funny, and over before the kids get restless.

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101 days away

A Christmas Carol

Nov 24, 2026 $35+ Cygnet Theatre, 2880 Roosevelt Rd,…

Some stories only get better told close enough to see the actors breathe, and Dickens's ghost story of second chances is one of them. Cygnet Theatre stages its A Christmas Carol in a gorgeous new home at The Joan in Liberty Station, an intimate space where Marley's chains rattle just feet from your seat and Tiny Tim's blessing lands square in the chest. This is the warm, faithful, beautifully-acted version of the classic, the antidote to a season that can feel like a checklist. A Christmas Carol runs November 24 through December 24, 2026, at Cygnet Theatre, San Diego. Make it the night the holidays actually begin, bring the family or the friend who needs a little softening, and come let a two-hundred-year-old story do what it has always done: send you home believing people can change.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2026 -- New York, NY

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🌎 Nation's Best 102 days away

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2026 -- New York, NY

Nov 26, 2026 77th Street & Central Park West, N…

From 77th Street down to Herald Square on Thanksgiving morning, two and a half million people line the route. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has been doing this since 1924. The parade experience on the ground is unlike watching it on television. The balloons — some 16 giant character balloons representing beloved cultural icons from Snoopy to SpongeBob — tower five to six stories above the crowd and move with an unpredictable, living quality that cameras cannot capture. Broadway performers open each show segment. Marching bands from across the country perform along the 2.5-mile route. The floats are hand-built artworks. The energy of a crowd that lines up before dawn, wrapped in coats and coffee cups, for something they have seen every year since childhood — is genuinely moving in a way that resists irony. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is worth attending if you have ever watched it on television and wondered what it would be like to be there. The answer: colder, louder, and more emotionally resonant than you expect. This is one of the rare public events that functions identically for a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old. If you are a New Yorker who has always meant to go and never has: this is the year. Viewing tips: The best spots are along Central Park West from 72nd to 77th Street — arrive before 7 AM to claim a spot against the barriers. The parade steps off at 8:30 AM and passes any given point by 10 AM. Bring hand warmers, thermos coffee, and folding chairs. Avoid Herald Square — it is the most crowded and worst vantage point despite being the broadcast location. Midtown hotel prices spike 300-500 percent the week of Thanksgiving. Book months in advance or stay in Brooklyn. The parade is free, public, and unreservable. The transaction is not logistical. It is the decision to show up and be present at something that will look the same and feel different every single time.

Makers Arcade Holiday Fair 2026 — Broadway Pier, San Diego

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119 days away

Makers Arcade Holiday Fair 2026 — Broadway Pier, San Diego

Every day · Next Dec 12 1000 N Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA 92…

You know the gift problem. Somebody matters, and everything you scroll past looks like it was designed by an algorithm for a person who does not exist. This solves it the old way. A hundred and twenty local makers set up on the pier and sell things they made with their hands: ceramics, jewelry, candles that smell like an actual memory instead of a marketing brief, prints by artists whose studios are ten miles from your house. There is a free make-and-take wreath station where a kid builds something and then refuses to ever put it down. And all of it happens with the bay right behind you, because December here is sun and shirtsleeves while the rest of the country is indoors. A weekend on the Broadway Pier, small admission at the door, kids free. Bring the person you have no idea what to get. Let them pick it out in front of you.

Coming Soon

119 days away

Elf - The Musical

Dec 12, 2026 $40+ Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

Buddy the Elf, in all his maple-syrup-on-spaghetti, smiling-is-my-favorite glory, gets the full Broadway treatment, and for a certain kind of family the Will Ferrell movie has become as load-bearing a Christmas tradition as the tree itself. Elf - The Musical brings that manic, sweet, deeply quotable holiday joy to the stage of the Hollywood Pantages, with big song-and-dance numbers and a heart as gooey as a candy-cane forest. It is pure, uncynical December fun, scaled for kids but written so the parents laugh too. Elf - The Musical plays the Pantages on Saturday, December 12, 2026, in Hollywood off the Metro B Line. Wear the ugly sweater, make it the kickoff to your holiday season, and come remember that the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.

Coming Soon

119 days away

A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

Dec 12, 2026 $40+ Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N Grand Ave,…

If you have ever watched a live show teeter on the edge of total catastrophe and laughed until it hurt, this is your holiday tradition: from Mischief, the company behind The Play That Goes Wrong, comes a Dickens Christmas where the scenery collapses, the actors forget their lines, the ghosts arrive late, and somehow Scrooge still finds his heart by the final bow. It is precision-engineered slapstick, the kind of theater that has grandparents and eight-year-olds gasping at the same pratfall. A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong plays the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center in downtown LA December 12, 2026 through January 10, 2027. Bring the family, bring the friend who thinks they hate theater, and come start a new December tradition built entirely on beautiful disaster. Warning: you will laugh so hard you miss half the jokes.

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124 days away

The Lion King — Hollywood Pantages

Dec 17 – Feb 13, 2027 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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124 days away

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

Dec 17, 2026 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.

Elf the Musical — Broadway San Diego at the Civic Theatre (Holiday Season 2026)

Daily

136 days away

Elf the Musical — Broadway San Diego at the Civic Theatre (Holiday Season 2026)

Every day · Next Dec 29 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 3rd …

The movie became a meme became a cultural institution became a Broadway musical became the thing every family does between Christmas and New Year's because nothing else captures that specific week-between-holidays energy quite like Buddy the Elf trying to hug a stranger. Elf the Musical at the San Diego Civic Theatre is the holiday show that works for the four-year-old and the forty-year-old in the same row — and both of them will be singing 'Santa's Coming to Town' on the drive home. The touring production brings the full Broadway staging: the sets are enormous, the costumes are absurd, and the cast treats the material with exactly the right amount of seriousness, which is none at all. Broadway San Diego closes the 2026 calendar with this one, and the timing is perfect — the week between Christmas and New Year's when nobody has anywhere to be and everyone needs somewhere to go. December 29, 2026 through January 3, 2027. San Diego Civic Theatre, downtown.

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16 Gathering

182 days away

LA Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade 2027

Feb 13, 2027 Chinatown Central Plaza, 970 N Bro…

Firecrackers go off in long strings and the sound comes back off the buildings on Broadway, doubled, so that for a few seconds you cannot tell where the street ends. Then the lions come. Troupes out of kung fu schools all over the region, some of them kids, weaving through a crowd that has stood on this sidewalk for generations: grandparents who watched this parade as children now holding grandchildren who will do the same. Marching bands, community floats, dragon dances, and a festival that spills off Broadway into the plazas with food, lanterns, and calligraphers working in the open where you can stand and watch the brush move. Chinatown, free to stand and watch, and take Metro, because the parking disappears hours ahead of you. This one runs on the Year of the Goat. Bring whoever in your family has been meaning to take you to something like this and never quite got around to it.

Coming Soon

227 days away

Operation Mincemeat — Pantages 2027

Mar 30 – Apr 18, 2027 From $75 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

A musical about a corpse should not work. Dress a dead body in a uniform, plant fake invasion plans on it, float it ashore where the Nazis will find it — and somehow that becomes one of the funniest, most moving shows anybody has made in years. It ran and ran in the West End on word of mouth, won the Olivier for Best New Musical, and built a devoted international following before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Now it makes its US debut at the Pantages. SpitLip wrote it and first performed it themselves, structured as a troupe putting on a show inside the show — closest in sensibility to Monty Python attempting a genuine spy thriller, and far more affecting than that description can carry. The Pantages is one of the grand rooms on this coast, and the B Line puts you at the door. Take the friend who says they do not like musicals. Watch that position collapse.

Coming Soon

347 days away

Hamilton — Hollywood Pantages 2027

Jul 28 – Aug 29, 2027 From $89 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

Some people can name the exact seat they were in the first time they heard a stage rap the American Revolution, and they have been waiting for a reason to sit in one again. The show that rewired what a Broadway musical could be - blending hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and classic musical theater into the story of Alexander Hamilton - comes back within reach for a full month. It won 11 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and the original cast recording remains one of the best-selling cast albums ever made, but none of that is why the tickets vanish weeks out. It is the rush of watching a founding father's life told at a tempo no history class ever managed. This extended engagement gives Southern California a rare window at a show that routinely sells out fast. The run plays Tuesday through Sunday with matinee and evening performances throughout. Accessible seating is available in the main orchestra. Take the Metro B Line to Hollywood and Highland, one block away; parking in the Hollywood and Highland structure is validated for ticket holders. Hamilton, Hollywood Pantages Theatre, July 28 through August 29, 2027. A historic 2,700-seat house on Hollywood Boulevard.

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