Winter Park's Holiday Season Has a New Name. The Calendar Underneath It Doesn't.

Last holiday season, a petition circulated claiming Winter Park had quietly stripped "Christmas" from its winter calendar, that the tree in Central Park had been renamed the "Holiday Tree," and that decades of tradition were being erased one press release at a time. It picked up signatures. It also got most of its facts wrong, and the correction from City Hall is more interesting than the complaint, because the pattern it describes is still exactly how this year's season is organized.

The city did ask for one name to change: the umbrella term for the whole season, which for years had been marketed as "Hometown Holidays" and which the Park Avenue District briefly rebranded to "Christmas on Park." That's the only label in motion. The half dozen individual events underneath it, the ones people actually put on their calendars, kept their names. Christmas in the Park is still called Christmas in the Park. The Christmas Parade is still called the Christmas Parade. City spokeswoman Clarissa Howard put it plainly when the story broke: "We can't return to doing something that we haven't done." Press releases going back to 2005 have called the ceremony an "annual tree-lighting" without ever using the word Christmas in that specific phrase, so nothing there changed either.

If you live here, the naming fight is mostly noise. The real story for this year's season is a different number entirely, and it changes how you should plan your nights out on Park Avenue more than any sign ever will.

Who Actually Runs What

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Winter Park's holiday season isn't run by one organization. It's four groups working in parallel, which is normal for a small city but rarely gets explained anywhere.

The Winter Park Chamber of Commerce runs Winter on the Avenue, the tree-lighting street party, and the Christmas Parade the following day. The City of Winter Park co-hosts the tree lighting and handles road closures and public safety. The Morse Museum runs Christmas in the Park independently, a tradition that started in 1979 when the museum's benefactors, Hugh and Jeannette McKean, began lighting a set of Tiffany memorial windows in Central Park as a way to share part of their collection outside the museum's walls. This December marks the 47th year they've done it. And since 2024, the Park Avenue District, a newer merchants and residents group, has taken over the corridor's physical decor, adding the Cathedral of Lights walk-through display and the children's carousel in front of City Hall. That first year's additions were funded by roughly $100,000 from the city matched by private donations.

Four organizers, one shared six-week window. That's why the "who renamed what" argument got tangled. Nobody was lying. Nobody was fully right either, because nobody involved runs the whole thing.

The Nights Worth Marking

Here's what's confirmed for this year, based on the Chamber's and Morse Museum's own event pages:

Winter on the Avenue is free and includes strolling carolers, a menorah lighting led by Rabbi Dovid Dubov of Chabad Orlando, s'mores from Winter Park Fire-Rescue, snow slides from the Parks & Recreation department, and Popcorn Flicks in the Park, a partnership between the Enzian Theater and the city's Community Redevelopment Agency where you bring your own blanket and pick up dinner from a Park Avenue restaurant beforehand. Mayor Sheila DeCiccio leads the countdown for the tree. The parade the next morning has run for more than 65 years and remains the oldest continuous holiday parade in Central Florida, with over 80 organizations from marching bands to scouting troops walking the route.

Beyond those anchor dates, the season fills in with events that return every year without a fixed public date this far out. The Bach Festival Society holds its A Classic Christmas concert at Knowles Memorial Chapel on the Rollins College campus. Mead Botanical Garden lights its trails for Seasons Greetings from the Garden. The Hannibal Square Heritage Center hosts its own Light Up Hannibal Square evening with a free photo with Santa and a holiday concert on West New England Avenue. The Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens runs Polasek Nights, a 1920s-themed speakeasy evening among the lakeside sculptures. Wreaths Across America lays remembrance wreaths at Palm and Pineywood cemeteries in mid-December. None of these compete with the Chamber's or the Morse's marquee nights. They fill the gaps, and locals tend to treat them as the quieter, less crowded version of the season.

What Actually Changed: The Crowd

The number that matters isn't in any petition. It's in the city's own accounting of who shows up. The most recent published figures, covering the 2024 season, put attendance at roughly 350,000 people across the six-week run, up about 7 percent from the year before. That growth predates any naming dispute. It tracks with the Park Avenue District taking over the lighting budget in 2024 and adding the Cathedral of Lights and carousel, both of which turned a stroll down Park Avenue into a photographed, geotagged destination in a way the string lights alone hadn't managed.

A 7 percent year-over-year jump on a base that size means several thousand more cars, strollers, and dinner reservations funneling into the same six blocks between Webster and Fairbanks. The city's holiday press materials now include a standing reminder that many events require road closures, and they point residents toward the closures and construction page before assuming their usual route to the post office or the library is open. That's a bigger practical shift for someone who lives three blocks off the avenue than whatever a sign in Central Park is called.

Planning Around It

If you're local, the logistics matter more than the branding. The city's own holiday guidance points residents toward SunRail, which drops passengers at the Winter Park station next to Central Park, as the easier way to reach weekday events without hunting for a spot. On Dec. 4 and Dec. 5, when Park Avenue itself closes to cars for the street party and the parade route, parking is limited to the street, the Morse Museum's lot, and city lots, and that supply gets absorbed early. Anyone doing a normal Friday dinner on the avenue during the first two weeks of December should expect the sidewalks to be fuller and the wait at a table longer than they were during Fall's Park Avenue Refresh construction, since that project and this crowd overlap on the same six blocks.

The workaround most residents have already found is to spread the season out rather than trying to catch everything on the two biggest nights. Christmas in the Park draws a different, generally calmer crowd than the parade weekend, since it's a museum program built around a concert and a lighted window display rather than a street closure. Mead Botanical Garden and the Hannibal Square Heritage Center's Light Up event sit outside the Park Avenue footprint entirely, which makes them the better choice for anyone who wants the season's atmosphere without navigating the same traffic twice in one weekend.

The Takeaway

Last year's petition asked whether Winter Park was erasing a tradition. The more accurate question is why a season that's been running under some version of these names for decades suddenly needed a public correction at all. The answer is that it's a bigger, more attended, more heavily marketed six weeks than it used to be, run by four different organizations that don't always coordinate their messaging, and growing fast enough that the city has started publishing attendance figures the way it publishes road closure notices. That's not a rebrand. That's a neighborhood outgrowing its own paperwork.

Whether you've lived on the lakes for twenty years or moved into a bungalow off Interlachen last spring, the practical move this December is the same: pick your two or three nights, know which ones require the train instead of a car, and treat the smaller events, Mead's garden lights, the Heritage Center's evening, Polasek's speakeasy, as the reward for skipping the crowd rather than a consolation prize.

If you're weighing a move to Winter Park and want the kind of neighborhood-level detail that doesn't show up on a listing page, from which streets clear fastest during the holidays to which blocks feel different depending on the season, that's the conversation Denise Beserock has with clients before they ever look at a house. Let's Connect.