What is Christmas at the Princess?
Take a AAA Five Diamond resort, give it a theme park’s holiday budget, and let it escalate annually for a decade and a half — that’s Christmas at the Princess, the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess’s late-November-through-New-Year’s transformation into the biggest holiday production in Arizona.
The scale is the story: millions of lights across the 65-acre property, a multi-story musical tree experience, an honest-to-goodness outdoor ice rink, choreographed light shows over the resort’s lagoon, trains and carousel rides for the small, elaborately staged Santa encounters, S’mores fire pits, and a seasonal food-and-drink program that takes the assignment seriously.
Since starting in 2010, it’s grown from resort amenity into regional pilgrimage — a ticketed nightly attraction drawing visitors by the hundreds of thousands each season, with December weekends selling out like concerts.
Positioning matters: this is the maximalist, paid pole of Scottsdale’s holiday spectrum. Scottsdazzle downtown is the free, walkable civic version. Most local families calibrate one Princess night per season and fill the rest downtown — a ratio I endorse.
Doing a Princess night well
Ticket strategy is everything. Pricing is dynamic: the identical production costs dramatically less on a first-week-of-December Tuesday than a December 21st Saturday, and the crowd difference is larger than the price difference. Buy online in advance (walk-up availability on peak nights is not a thing), and if skating matters to your crew, reserve rink slots at purchase — ice capacity is the first thing to sell through.
Pace it like a park. Arrive at opening for golden-hour photos before full dark, hit the marquee items early (tree experience, rink), then let the night soften into lagoon shows, fire pits, and hot chocolate. Three to four hours is the natural visit; comfortable shoes are non-negotiable across 65 acres.
Eat strategically. The seasonal food stands are good and priced like resort food stands. The move for a special night: book one of the resort restaurants for a mid-evening reservation and treat the event as its before-and-after. For families, feeding everyone beforehand and budgeting for treats-only inside saves genuine money.
Weather honesty: desert December nights sit in the 40s and 50s. The postcard promises t-shirt skating; the reality after 7 p.m. wants the same layers you’d wear to Canal Convergence. Locals spot tourists by their shivering.
How a resort invented a regional tradition
The strategic problem Christmas at the Princess solved is worth appreciating: December is trough season for desert resorts. The snowbird and event calendar that packs Scottsdale January through April goes quiet; holiday travelers historically flew toward snow, not away from it. In 2010 the Fairmont inverted the logic — build a holiday spectacle compelling enough to make the desert a Christmas destination itself, fill December rooms with families, and sell the warm-weather twist (skating in sunshine, lights on palms) as the feature.
It worked beyond reason. The production grew a ratchet — each season’s additions (the lagoon shows, the expanding light count, new lands and characters) became the next season’s baseline — and the event now functions as an anchor attraction for the whole metro’s December tourism, with the resort booked around it and imitators across the Valley’s resort class following the playbook.
There’s a real local debate about what it represents: the ticket prices on peak nights put it out of reach for plenty of families, and the contrast with the free civic tradition downtown is stark. The generous read is that Scottsdale’s holiday ecosystem works because both poles exist — the Princess supplies the bucket-list spectacle, Scottsdazzle supplies the commons, and December here genuinely offers something at every budget from zero dollars up.
The verdict, from a repeat visitor
It earns the hype roughly one night per year per household. The production values are unmatched in the state, the ice-rink-under-palms photo justifies itself, and small kids experience the place as a portal. Just go early-season, midweek, layered, and pre-booked — the difference between a well-planned Princess night and a December-Saturday improvisation is the difference between magic and a very expensive queue. Plan it like a local: this is the Valley’s Disneyland trip that happens to be ten minutes up Scottsdale Road.