Every year, usually the day after Thanksgiving, Riverside comes alive with holiday spirit, its downtown lit up with millions of strung lights and Christmas regalia. From the week after Thanksgiving to about a week after the new year, downtown Riverside becomes one of the largest lighting displays in California with the Mission Inn at the center. Since 1993, this event has brought together the community to celebrate Christmas amidst the city’s most well-known historical site. For many in Riverside, the Festival of Lights lighting ceremony is the start of the Christmas season, a huge holiday party that brings together so many of the city’s families.
As a lifetime Riverside resident, I have never known a white Christmas. I have never truly associated a change in weather with the beginning of the holiday season; rather, for as long as I can remember, this Festival of Lights has been the keystone of Christmas in my family’s traditions. Since I was born 21 years ago, despite a move away from Riverside, we have attended this lighting ceremony. It has always provided me with a measure of time, feeling so rare and limited but never failing to come back year after year.
When I was a child, I always assumed that a lighting ceremony such as this was typical in every American city. It was not until much later in my childhood, when I began to see the Festival of Lights in national news that I began to understand the exceptional nature of Riverside’s beckoning of Christmas. At a young age, I had only visited downtown for field trips to museums, so seeing this area of the city all lit up was incredible — a place so seemingly old, made new again with the gilding of beautiful, colorful lights. This event has undeniably shaped my timeline of when Christmas should be, all the decor and gifts in stores feel like they have come early until I attend this festival.
As I have grown older, this event has grown alongside me, the crowds are so large and overwhelming now in comparison to the few thousand Riverside locals in attendance when I was young. I have seen the display go from just the block of the hotel itself out to nearly every business on the adjoining blocks. I have seen the fireworks show go from a short, two-minute silent showcase to a backtracked ten-minute display (that has, on several occasions, set the Mission Inn’s rooftop ablaze). This year, the ceremony is the largest it has ever been, with over 20,000 in attendance, not an event for just Riverside residents any longer.
Now, being an adult student at UCR, my relationship with this ceremony has not changed; this year’s, as every year’s, ceremony was just as dazzling as it was when I was a child. Although now overcrowded and cramped, I still felt the same sense of child-like wonder I had felt for every year before. Maybe it is the scaling number of lights that seems to one-up each previous year or maybe it is just a simple love for Christmas, but nonetheless, this event has remained magical. As I watch various Riverside staples with which I grew up close their doors (The Riverside Museum, the old Riverside public library), I often wonder if children now feel the same way I did when I was their age, enchanted by this special Riverside display which has so influenced me.
The Festival of Lights is certainly a municipal pride, its glimmering lights attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, but to me it represents a treasured family tradition. In asking my friends who also have grown up in the Raincross city, I have found that many of them also share a familial tradition of attending the lighting ceremony. This Festival of Lights brings holiday joy upon all the residents of Riverside and the greater Inland Empire. If one scales any mountain in this valley during December and they get the right view, they might see the Mission Inn and all its lights — a beacon of Christmas spirit.
