What is Stroll in the Glow?
Stroll in the Glow is Fountain Hills’ holiday opening night, a free evening on the first Saturday of December when the Fountain Hills Chamber of Commerce closes the town’s one downtown street, the Avenue of the Fountains, lights it end to end, lights the official town Christmas tree with the mayor, brings Santa in on a fire truck and sends everyone walking downhill to Fountain Park, where hot-air balloons glow on the lawn beside the lake until 8. The 2026 edition, the chamber’s 37th annual, is Saturday, December 5, 2026, 5 to 8 p.m.
The schedule has three fixed points. The lighting of the Avenue is at about 5:45, thousands of lights in the trees and on the medians between La Montana Drive and Saguaro Boulevard plus the town tree. Santa arrives before 6 in a red fire truck and sits for free photos. The Balloon Glow at the Fountain runs 6 to 8 in the park a block south. In between, chamber member businesses and nonprofits set up along the sidewalks, which turns the Avenue into a one-night street fair; a live nativity and a letters-to-Santa station are past regulars the chamber describes as favorites without promising them every year.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is thirty minutes out Shea Boulevard over the McDowells, a town that was built in 1970 around a 560-foot fountain, and a tree lighting at the scale of a place with 24,000 people. It is the small, cold, free end of the Valley’s holiday spectrum, and the balloons in front of the fountain are the picture you will not get anywhere else. The rest of the month is in our holiday season in Scottsdale guide and on the December page.
How to do it
Timing. Leave Scottsdale by 4:15. Shea east of the 101 climbs over the pass and drops into town in 25 to 30 minutes with no traffic, and the town lots fill between 4:30 and 5:15 as families stake out the tree. The whole thing is over by 8, which puts you back in Old Town by 8:45.
Parking and the route. The Avenue of the Fountains runs east from La Montana Drive to Saguaro Boulevard, where it meets the park. Come in on Shea, turn north on Palisades rather than Saguaro, and drop into the Town Hall and library lots from the west, the same move that works for the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the art fairs. The Avenue itself is the event, so plan on walking from the west end; the chamber posts a public route map each fall, and the park’s own lot on Saguaro is the one that fills first with balloon crews.
The order of events. Stand near the tree for the 5:45 lighting, watch for the fire truck, then walk east four blocks and down the slope into Fountain Park for the balloons. The balloons are tethered and lit from inside, a glow rather than a launch, and they stay up until 8 or until the wind says otherwise. The fountain fires for 15 minutes at the top of each hour until 9, so the 7 p.m. cycle with the lit balloons in the foreground and the dark McDowells behind is the shot; the 6 o’clock cycle goes off while most people are still on the Avenue.
Eat early or late. The Avenue’s restaurants and patios are full from 6 on. Book a 4:45 table on the strip, or drive up to the ridge at ADERO Scottsdale, the rebuilt CopperWynd above town, for a sunset drink and dinner after the glow. Food booths along the Avenue vary year to year.
What to bring. A jacket and a blanket. Fountain Hills sits above 1,500 feet and a December evening is in the 50s at 5:45 and the 40s by 8. A wagon for small children earns its keep on the walk down to the park and back up.
What to skip. Parking at the park, and waiting for the nativity or the letters station unless the chamber’s current listing confirms them.
A lighting for a town built around a fountain
Fountain Hills began in 1970 as a McCulloch Properties sales project, a master-planned town in the hills east of Scottsdale whose first structure was a 560-foot fountain, the tallest in the world when it was switched on, built to be seen from the sales office. The Avenue of the Fountains was laid out as the commercial spine running from the hills down to the lake, and most of what the town does in public happens on it. The town incorporated in 1989, and the chamber of commerce’s edition numbering, 37th annual in 2026, puts the first Stroll in the Glow in 1990, the year after. The chamber does not publish a founding date, and we have not found a contemporary account of the first stroll, so treat the year as the chamber’s count rather than a documented fact. The Thanksgiving Day Parade on the same street is older, from 1984, and the two bracket the town’s holiday season: the parade opens it on Thanksgiving morning, the stroll lights it nine days later, and the fountain runs through both.
The fixed schedule, lighting at 5:45, Santa before 6, balloons at the park until 8, is the recent form; the live nativity and the letters-to-Santa station the chamber calls past favorites belong to an earlier version. In 2025 Mayor Gerry Friedel threw the switch and the Town of Fountain Hills was a sponsor; the 2026 sponsors are a propane company, a realty office and the local emergency room, which tells you the scale. Chamber members register for free to set up on the Avenue, so the booths are the dentist, the Rotary and the pet rescue rather than vendors.
The balloons and the fountain
The balloon glow is the thing that lifts it above the standard tree lighting. The park’s 35 acres of turf around a 29-acre lake give balloon crews room to inflate, and lit envelopes on the lawn with the fountain’s column behind them is a picture only this town can make. It is also the fragile part: balloons do not inflate in wind, and neither does the fountain run in it, so a gusty December evening can take both away at once. Check the forecast and go anyway; the Avenue lights do not depend on the weather.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale’s own December runs large. Scottsdazzle fills Old Town from November 28 to the end of the year, Christmas at the Princess is a resort theme park with a four-story tree and a train, and the light shows at the zoo and the botanical garden draw hundreds of thousands. Fountain Hills offers the opposite: a free three-hour evening in a town that still turns out for its own tree, with a fire-truck Santa, a fountain and a dozen glowing balloons, thirty minutes away. The north-side version of this, the Carefree Christmas Festival with its snow and light parade, ended in 2019; Fountain Hills kept going. For a visiting family with children under ten, or a new resident wondering what the towns across the McDowells are like, the first Saturday of December is the night to find out. The Fountain Hills guide has the rest of the town.