What is the Tempe Fantasy of Lights?
The Tempe Fantasy of Lights is downtown Tempe’s holiday season in two free Saturday nights. The first is a lighted street parade down Mill Avenue that ends with the lighting of the city’s tree in Centerpoint Plaza, the Saturday after Thanksgiving: in 2026, November 28, 4 to 8 p.m. The second, two weeks later, is the Boat Parade, a procession of lit and decorated boats around Tempe Town Lake followed by fireworks off the Mill Avenue bridge: December 12, 2026, 4 to 9 p.m., centered on Tempe Beach Park.
The parade is the older of the two. In the 1994–95 season three Tempe Kiwanians who also sat on the city council, Mayor Neil Giuliano and councilmembers Joseph Lewis and Linda Spears, came back from a League of Cities conference in Minneapolis with the idea of a lighted night parade, and the Kiwanis Club of Tempe produced the first one, timed to the downtown tree lighting because a parade every night was never practical. The boat parade followed in 1999, the year the city filled the lake, and has circled it every December since. Both are now run by the Downtown Tempe Authority, the Mill Avenue business improvement district, with the Kiwanis still supplying the parade crews.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is the nearest holiday event with water and fireworks in it, twenty minutes down Scottsdale Road and the 202, and the one that pairs most naturally with a night on Mill Avenue. Neither night is on the scale of Phoenix’s APS Electric Light Parade; the charm is that a college town’s main street and its lake still throw their own party. Our holiday season note places both in the month.
How to do it
The street parade, November 28. Entries stage on Ash Avenue between 5th and 3rd streets, head east on 3rd, turn south down Mill Avenue to 7th Street and loop back to 5th and Ash, with Santa at the rear. The units are community groups, scout troops, dance teams, high school bands and local businesses, all lit; think hometown parade rather than Disney. The Downtown Tempe Authority had not posted the 2026 step-off time in October, but the window is 4 to 8 p.m. and the tree lighting in Centerpoint Plaza on 7th Street just west of Mill, a tree the DTA measured at 36 feet in 2025, comes after the last entry, followed by entertainment on the plaza stage and Santa photos.
The boat parade, December 12. Tempe Beach Park opens at 4 with a holiday market, food vendors (15 in 2025), a beer and wine garden, a stage and free Santa photos. In 2025 the boats, dozens of them carrying about 40,000 lights between them, left the marina at 7 and took most of an hour to circle; the fireworks went off at 8:15 over the Mill Avenue bridge and the night ended at 9. The park enforces a clear bag policy on event nights.
Where to stand. The beach park lawn fills by 6 and sees the boats at a distance. The pedestrian path along the Mill Avenue bridge and the lake’s south edge is closer to the loop, and the north shore by the Tempe Center for the Arts, reached by the pedestrian bridge west of the arts center, is quieter still, with the fireworks framed over the bridge and the butte behind.
Getting there. Ride the rail. The Valley Metro light rail station at Mill Avenue and 3rd Street is a block from the parade and five minutes’ walk from the lake, and the streetcar, which opened in 2022, stops at Tempe Beach Park on Rio Salado Parkway and at 3rd and Mill. From Scottsdale, drive the 202 or McClintock to the Dorsey/Apache park-and-ride or any station and ride in. Driving to the lake works only if you are parked by 5:30; the Centerpoint garage, the W6 garage on 6th Street and the Hayden Ferry lots off Rio Salado all charge event rates and empty slowly.
Eat on Mill. Both nights end by 9; the side streets east of Mill, 6th and 7th, have the patios and shorter waits. Book on boat parade night.
Do not stack it. The winter Tempe Festival of the Arts closes Mill Avenue the weekend of December 4–6, 2026, the weekend between the two Fantasy of Lights nights, and the Fountain Hills Thanksgiving Day Parade is two days before the street parade; three Saturdays in a row downtown is one too many with children.
A Kiwanis parade, a new lake, a streetcar
The parade’s origin is a civic club story. The Tempe Visitors and Convention Bureau wanted a holiday event to pull people onto Mill Avenue after dark, and the three councilmembers who saw a nightly lighted parade in Minneapolis knew where to find free labor: their own club. Linda Spears recruited the Kiwanis Club of Tempe, which named it the Kiwanis Club of Tempe Fantasy of Lights Parade and ran it on a shoestring. The club’s own history admits the first entries were sparse, mostly scout troops and city vehicles, with fees of $50 for a commercial float and $25 for everyone else, payable in canned food. The original route left the Red River Opry on the north bank, now the Marquee Theatre, crossed the bridge and ran down Mill to 7th Street, where Santa was dropped at the tree.
Two pieces of infrastructure changed it. Tempe Town Lake filled in 1999, and that December the first boat parade circled it; fireworks off the Mill Avenue bridge, where the Kiwanis already shot the Fourth of July show, are now its finale. Then the light rail arrived in 2008 with tracks on 3rd Street, which killed the parade’s second staging area at the Mission Palms lot and forced the current route from Ash Avenue. By then the Kiwanis had handed the parade to the Downtown Tempe Authority after about eight years of running it; Linda Spears stayed on as parade marshal and the club still provides the manpower.
The boat parade has become the bigger night. Its fleet is, in the Downtown Tempe Authority’s words, boats of all shapes and sizes, dressed by families, businesses and clubs, and the Downtown Tempe Authority’s count of about 40,000 lights on the water in 2025 undersells how it reads from the shore, with the lit bridges and the Hayden Ferry towers behind.
The Scottsdale angle
Scottsdale has a canal and no lake, and its December events, Scottsdazzle and the resort shows, are land-bound. The boat parade is the Valley’s only holiday night on open water, and it is twenty minutes from Old Town, closer than Glendale’s lights or the Phoenix parade. Go on December 12 for the boats and the fireworks, eat on 6th Street afterward, and treat the November 28 street parade as a bonus for a weekend when you are already south: the tree lighting in Centerpoint Plaza is small-town in the best sense, and it opens a Mill Avenue holiday season that runs through the December arts festival the following weekend.