What is Scottsdazzle?
Every place with a downtown does something for the holidays. Scottsdazzle is Scottsdale doing all of it at once, under one name, for five straight weeks.
From the Saturday after Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve, the city programs dozens of holiday events across Old Town: the opening tree-lighting sing-along at the Waterfront (the tree is several stories of lights beside the canal, and Santa participates in the switch-flipping), horse-drawn carriage rides through the lit districts, strolling carolers, holiday markets and pop-up shops, craft nights, and themed evenings that rotate through the Fifth Avenue, Marshall Way, and Main Street districts.
Nearly all of it is free. The name is a city-hall portmanteau that locals initially mocked and now use without irony — the fate of all successful branding.
The real product is the setting. Christmas at 65 degrees, string lights on saguaros, canal water doubling every glow: desert holiday is its own genre, and Old Town in December is its best expression. You trade snow for the ability to feel your hands, and honestly the deal is excellent.
Building your Scottsdazzle nights
The season has a structure worth knowing:
Opening weekend (Thanksgiving Saturday, typically) is the big communal moment — the sing-along and tree lighting at the Waterfront draws the season’s largest crowd. Go if you love the collective-gasp moment; skip if crowds aren’t your holiday. The tree stays lit all season either way.
December weekends carry the scheduled programming — market nights, Santa appearances, live music, district events. The calendar at the official site is genuinely necessary; offerings change weekly and by district.
Weeknights are the connoisseur’s Scottsdazzle. Everything that matters — the lights, the tree, the canal reflections, the decorated districts — is on seven nights a week with no crowds Monday through Wednesday. A weeknight loop of the Waterfront and Marshall Way, hot drink in hand, is the fifteen-minute version of the entire season.
Carriage rides run through the season (these charge, and book up on peak nights — reserve, don’t stroll up, for December weekends). Pair one with dinner in Old Town and you’ve assembled the standard-issue Scottsdale December date, which is standard-issue because it’s good.
With kids: the Santa events, craft nights, and train-adjacent lights at nearby McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park (its own beloved holiday tradition, technically outside the Scottsdazzle banner) make an easy season-long rotation.
How the desert learned to do December
Old Town always had holiday pieces — merchant associations stringing their own lights, a tree here, carolers there — but they were fragmented, and for decades Scottsdale’s December identity belonged mostly to the resorts (the Fairmont’s Christmas at the Princess, most famously). In the mid-2010s the city consolidated: one brand, one calendar, one anchor tree at the Waterfront, and coordinated programming across the shopping districts. Scottsdazzle was born as, essentially, a holiday operating system for the district.
The timing was shrewd. The Waterfront had just established itself as an event venue via Canal Convergence, which ends in mid-November — Scottsdazzle picks up the same banks, the same light-loving audience, and the same “walk the canal at night” habit two weeks later. December is also Old Town retail’s make-or-break month, and a reason to linger after dark is worth real money to a district of galleries, boutiques, and restaurants.
The case for desert Christmas
Skeptics — usually recent transplants — say holidays need cold. The local counterargument, delivered from a Waterfront bench in a light jacket: tradition is about gathering, light against darkness, and marking the year’s turn, none of which require frostbite. The Sonoran version has its own liturgy — luminarias tracing adobe walls (a Southwestern tradition centuries older than electric lights), saguaros in ridiculous sweaters of LEDs, sunset alpenglow on Camelback as the lights come up. Scottsdazzle packages all of it without gatekeeping any of it.
By New Year’s Eve, when the season hands off to Old Town’s bar district for the Valley’s rowdiest countdown, the brand has done its quiet civic work: five weeks of reasons for a car-bound city to walk its own downtown at night. That habit, more than any single tree, is the thing worth lighting.