Light IT Up: Holiday Light Festivals

After the end of Daylight Saving Time, festivals that light the longer nights in various ways proliferate, starting with Halloween, and continuing with the likes of Chanukah and Diwali. Besides these holidays, unspecified "holiday light festivals" are known to spring up throughout the United States. It's far beyond our capacity to detail them all here, so we offer up one festival on each coast to whet your appetite for illumination.

The day after Thanksgiving, Riverside, California's Mission Inn will kick off its 14th annual Festival of Lights. The celebration—lasting until January 7—will fill the inn's 2.5-acre (1-hectare) grounds with two million lightbulbs illuminating the hotel's turrets and buttresses, cloisters, and gardens, as well as "Dickens' Carolers" in 17th-century costume and horse-drawn carriages. Hot cocoa will be on hand to help spectators brave the California winter.

A week later, New York will eschew such old-school aesthetics for the Grand Central Terminal Kaleidoscope, in which multicolored light projections set to music will wrap the main concourse like an extravagant gift. The seven-minute shows will run 21 times daily from December 1 through New Year's Day.

Let there be light!