What is Glendale Glitters?
Glendale Glitters is the West Valley’s holiday light display: more than two million lights and decorations, by the city’s 2026 count, strung through the trees of Murphy Park and about sixteen blocks of historic downtown Glendale, free to walk, nightly from Thanksgiving weekend to New Year’s Day. The City of Glendale has staged it since 1994, when it put 25,000 lights on the park’s trees and about 10,000 people came to see them switched on.
The 33rd season opens Friday, November 27, 2026, with the lighting ceremony at 5:45 p.m. in front of the Glendale Civic Center, followed by a two-night kickoff festival from 5 to 10 p.m. on November 27 and 28: about fifty vendors on Glenn Drive, carolers, live entertainment, photo stops and Santa. After the weekend the lights stay on every night from 5 to 10 p.m. through January 1, 2027, with Santa’s Village on Palmaire Avenue on the Friday and Saturday nights of December.
What makes 2026 different is the setting. Murphy Park and the City Hall campus around it spent four years under renovation, the park fenced and the display squeezed into a fraction of its usual ground; the campus reopened in June 2026 and the city’s special events administrator, Danny Williamson, told the Glendale Star the display returns to its full footprint. For a visitor based in Scottsdale it is the one big light show in the Valley that costs nothing and sits in a real old town square, 35 minutes west on the 101 and Glendale Avenue, and it belongs on the holiday season list for anyone who has already done the resort shows.
How to do it
Pick your night. The kickoff Friday has the ceremony, the crowd and the energy: the city counts 13,000 to 14,000 people a night on the opening weekend, and the sidewalks around the park are shoulder to shoulder from 6 to 9. If you want the lights and a table for dinner, any Tuesday through Thursday from the second week of December onward gives you the identical display with a tenth of the people.
Getting there and parking. From Old Town take the 101 north and west to Glendale Avenue, then east about two miles to 59th Avenue; 35 minutes without traffic, closer to an hour on a December Saturday evening. The city opens the downtown garage at 5835 W Palmaire Avenue free, and street parking on the residential blocks north of the park is free and legal. On the kickoff nights arrive by 5 or park north of Myrtle and walk in through Catlin Court, which is a better approach than Glendale Avenue anyway.
What to see. Murphy Park, at 58th and Glendale avenues, is the center: the big trees, the amphitheater, the photo installations. Walk west along Glendale Avenue for the lit storefronts of the antique district, then north on 58th Avenue into Catlin Court, the bungalow district between 58th and 59th avenues and Palmaire and Myrtle, where the shops stay open late on event nights and have run their own Christmas weekends since 2021.
Santa and the parade. Santa is at Santa’s Village, 5836 W Palmaire Avenue, from 6 p.m. on the Fridays and Saturdays of December (photos were $5 in 2025), not on the kickoff weekend. Glendale’s Hometown Christmas Parade runs down Glendale Avenue on a mid-December Saturday morning; the 2026 date was not posted when we checked.
What to eat. The old downtown has a dozen restaurants and bakeries within three blocks of the park, and they are the reason to come on a weeknight rather than a weekend. Book ahead on the kickoff nights or eat before 5.
What to skip. Do not try to combine Glitters with the APS Electric Light Parade on the same evening; the parade is the first Saturday of December in central Phoenix and the two crowds do not mix well on the freeways. Do them on separate nights, with ZooLights as the third.
From 25,000 lights to a million-dollar festival, and back
Glendale was a farm town with a square: Murphy Park, the three-acre block that founder W.J. Murphy gave the town in 1909 on the condition that it stay a park, sits in the middle of a grid of early-1900s brick storefronts and bungalows that are now the Valley’s antique district. In 1994 the city wrapped the park’s trees in about 25,000 lights and invited the town to a lighting; roughly 10,000 people came. The display grew every year, to 1.5 million lights across sixteen blocks by the 20th anniversary and about 1.7 million by 2020, and with it grew a season-long festival: themed weekends through December, a Glitter and Glow finale in January with hot air balloons on the streets, more than a hundred vendors, carnival rides and petting zoos. By 2017 the season drew 286,000 people and cost the city more than $1 million a year.
That number is what ended it. In 2018 City Manager Kevin Phelps proposed moving the money from a few enormous holiday events to smaller year-round programming, and the council agreed. Attendance fell to just over 100,000 in 2018 and 74,000 in 2019, when the budget covered only the lights. The pandemic took the opening weekend away entirely, and in 2021 the city dropped the name altogether and called what was left Murphy Park Lights, with $120,000 budgeted for all of its large holiday events. The merchants of Catlin Court, left out of the display and the programming, started their own multi-weekend Christmas in Catlin Court that year.
The reversal came in 2023, when the city restored the Glendale Glitters name and the two-night opening festival for the 30th anniversary and the season drew about 150,000, more than double the pandemic years, on a budget of about $420,000, a third of the old cost. The 2024 and 2025 editions kept that shape while the park itself disappeared behind construction fencing for the four-year renovation of the City Hall campus, which reopened in June 2026 with new systems and glazing in the civic buildings and a rebuilt park. The 2026 season is the first with the whole square back.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale’s own December is a paid proposition: Christmas at the Princess and Enchant charge admission, and even the city’s free Scottsdazzle program in Old Town is a set of evenings rather than a standing display. Glendale Glitters is the opposite: free, nightly for five weeks, and set in a real town square that has been a park since 1909. The drive is the price. Thirty-five minutes west is further than most visitors go in a week, which is exactly why the kickoff crowd is West Valley families rather than tourists, and why a weeknight in mid-December feels like a town’s Christmas rather than an attraction. Pair it with an early dinner in the antique district. For the rest of the month’s options see our December guide.