Detroit's 16th annual tree lighting will have some of our favorite things — music, Olympic figure skating, and Santa Claus

Staff Pick

By Jerilyn Jordan

Nov 21, 2019 at 9:04 am

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Detroit's 16th annual tree lighting will have some of our favorite things — music, Olympic figure skating, and Santa Claus

Courtesy of Downtown Detroit Partnership

Detroit’s beloved tree lighting ceremony is celebrating its sweet 16 this year, with a celebration that could easily be its biggest and brightest yet. The event, of course, revolves around the Michigan-grown 60-foot Norwegian Spruce in Detroit’s Campus Martius, which will be festooned with a whopping 19,000 shimmering holiday lights. This year, the lighting ceremony will also invite performances by the Detroit Youth Choir, which made waves on America’s Got Talent this summer, as well as Grammy-nominated hip-hop head-turned-crooner Mayer Hawthorne. The event will also boast a holiday-themed performance by world champion figure skater and Olympian Yuka Sato, as well as by Mirai Nagasu, the first American skater to land a triple axel during the Olympics, as she did in 2018. Beacon Park will host a live stream of the tree lighting and an evening of live musical performances. A fleet of food trucks will be on site, as will horse-drawn carriages, and shuttles will be offered to cart folks between Campus Martius and Beacon Park’s festivities. Oh yeah: The big man on campus, Santa Claus, will also be pulling double duty (wink, wink) between the two locations.

Event begins at 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22, at Campus Martius and Beacon Park; 800 Woodward Ave. and 1903 Grand River Ave., Detroit; downtowndetroit.org. Admission is free.

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