What it means
Scottsdazzle is what the City of Scottsdale calls December in Old Town. It is not one event but a label on a calendar: a tree lighting with a sing-along the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Santa at the farmers market, light “strolls” along the Waterfront, a holiday Gold Palette ArtWalk and concerts on the Civic Center lawn, all free, all inside a mile of each other. Locals say it without irony now, which is the sign a pun has become a place name. “Are you going to Scottsdazzle” means the tree lighting; “during Scottsdazzle” means December.
It has its own guide at Scottsdazzle, and the wider season, resort lights included, is in the holiday season note. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On banners down Scottsdale Road from mid-November, on the brochure map and the city’s events page, on the Old Town merchants’ windows and, each August, in the news release announcing the dates. Not at the Princess, which has its own name for its own show.
Where the word came from
Scottsdale had December events long before it had a name for them: a tree on the Civic Center mall, merchants’ open houses on Fifth Avenue, a Thursday ArtWalk that put out luminarias. What it lacked was a single thing to sell, and a city whose budget runs on visitor sales tax notices a hole like that. In 2015 the city’s tourism and events office bundled the tree lighting, the merchant promotions and a run of Old Town concerts under one word, and the word was a joke that worked. “Scottsdazzle” needs no explanation, fits on a banner and is impossible to confuse with anything in Phoenix or Tempe, which is most of what a destination brand has to do.
It grew the way municipal programs grow. The 2023 season, billed as the ninth annual, listed more than 40 activities between the November 25 tree lighting and December 31: Santa at the Old Town Farmers Market on four Saturdays, Small Business Saturday promotions, Scottsdazzle Strolls at the Waterfront on three December Saturdays, the Gold Palette ArtWalk on December 7 and a family concert at the Civic Center on December 9. The organizers’ own line, in the city’s release, was that “our elves start working months in advance.” The tree lighting itself has moved around: the Civic Center was torn up for its renovation from 2021 to 2023, and the ceremony went to the Waterfront, where the canal makes a better backdrop for a sing-along than a construction fence did.
What it is not
It is not Christmas at the Princess. The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess runs the Valley’s biggest lights show, with an ice rink, a train and millions of bulbs, eleven miles north of Old Town, with its own tickets and parking. Visitors arrive at the Civic Center expecting that and find a tree, a choir and a free concert instead. The two are not rivals, exactly, but they are not the same program, and the city’s brochure has never claimed otherwise. Nor is Scottsdazzle a parade; the horses come in February, for Western Week.
The fine print
The record for a ten-year-old marketing name is thin and this site has not padded it. The 2015 founding date rests on the city’s own count, “ninth annual” in 2023, rather than on a dated announcement from the first year; the site has found no release naming the person who coined the pun, and it does not credit one. The events list changes every season, so the 2023 program above is a snapshot, not a schedule. Check the official site, scottsdazzle.com, for the current year before planning around any single date.
What is stable is the shape. The season opens on the Saturday after Thanksgiving with the tree lighting and sing-along and closes December 31. It is run by the city with Old Town’s merchants, which is why the events cluster where the shops are: the Waterfront, the Civic Center, Fifth Avenue and the Arts District. Everything the city lists is free, which is the quiet distinction from the resort shows. And it is a visitor program as much as a resident one: the dates are announced in August, in time for the travel press, because the audience the city most wants in Old Town in December is the one that pays the bed tax.
The name’s one real success is that nobody questions it anymore. In 2015 it read as a groan; by its tenth season it was simply the word for the month, which is as much as any coined name can hope for.