When December arrives in the Texas Hill Country, the state capital of Austin rarely sees a single flake of snow; instead, sunny afternoons hover in the comfortable sixties before crisp evening air rolls off the Colorado River. Yet what Austin lacks in blizzards, it more than makes up for with live music, massive community light displays, quirky neighborhood pride, and Tex-Mex culinary traditions that make a Central Texas Christmas unlike anywhere else in the United States.
The Austin Trail of Lights and the Zilker Holiday Tree
Since it began in 1965 as a modest community gathering called the “Yule Fest,” the Austin Trail of Lights in Zilker Metropolitan Park has grown into the city’s longest-running and most beloved holiday tradition. Winding for a mile and a quarter along the wooded banks of Barton Creek, the pedestrian trail illuminates the Texas winter night with more than two million twinkling lights, ninety lighted holiday trees, and over seventy themed displays celebrating everything from classic winter fairy tales to Willie Nelson and giant Texas armadillos.
Standing right beside the Trail of Lights rises the monumental Zilker Holiday Tree, one of the most unique Christmas structures in the world because it is built around a surviving nineteenth-century piece of municipal lighting history: a 155-foot steel Moonlight Tower erected in the 1890s. Every November, city crews string over three thousand three hundred colored bulbs from the top of the iron tower down to a giant three-hundred-and-eighty-foot circumference circle on the grass below, creating a cone of swirling spiral stripes. On opening night, and throughout December, thousands of kids and adults stand directly underneath the glowing cone, look straight up at the central star, and spin around in dizzying circles until the lights blur into a psychedelic kaleidoscope—an essential rite of passage known to every local as the “Zilker Spin.”
37th Street Lights, Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, and Mozart’s on the Lake
True to Austin’s longstanding unofficial motto—”Keep Austin Weird”—some of the city’s best holiday traditions were born from grassroots neighborhood creativity and the live music scene:
- The 37th Street Weird Lights: Starting in the 1980s along a single residential block of 37th Street just north of the University of Texas campus in Guadalupe/Hyde Park, neighbors began competing to hang the most eccentric, surreal light displays imaginable—stringing lights across the street from roof to roof and filling front yards with glowing sock monkeys, UFOs, bicycle sculptures, and art installations that still draw thousands of pedestrians each December night.
- The Armadillo Christmas Bazaar: Operating for nearly five decades since its birth at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters music hall in 1976, this multi-day art and music festival combines a fine-art market featuring nearly two hundred local artisans with continuous live Texas country, blues, and indie-rock concerts on stage while shoppers sip local craft beer.
- Mozart’s Coffee Roasters and the Paramount Sing-Along: Out on the wooden decks of Mozart’s Coffee Roasters overhanging the water of Lake Austin, families reserve tables beneath a choreographed musical light show reflecting off the river, while downtown on Congress Avenue, the historic 1915 Paramount Theatre hosts massive interactive sing-along screenings of holiday cinema classics and Ballet Austin’s production of The Nutcracker at the Long Center.
Christmas Tamales, Smoked Brisket, and Polar Bear Swims
When Austin families sit down to eat on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, traditional roast turkey shares the table with two undisputed pillars of Central Texas cuisine: handmade Christmas Tamales and Central Texas Smoked Brisket. Inherited from centuries-old Mexican and Tejano family traditions (las tamaladas), families gather in the days before Christmas to spread masa corn dough onto soaked corn husks, fill them with slow-cooked red-chile pork, green-chile chicken, or sweet cinnamon-raisin fillings, steam them by the dozens in massive tamale pots, and share foil-wrapped bundles with neighbors and friends.
Simultaneously, Austin’s legendary barbecue pitmasters spend the nights leading up to December twenty-fourth tending post-oak fires to smoke whole beef briskets, jalapeño-cheddar sausages, and pecan pies for holiday tables. And on Christmas morning or New Year’s Day, when the sun shines bright over Zilker Park, hundreds of hardy Austinites put on Santa hats and bathing suits to leap straight into the spring-fed waters of Barton Springs Pool, which maintains a refreshing sixty-eight to seventy degrees Fahrenheit every single day of the year.
