Light Up Night
Festival in Pittsburgh

Light Up Night is a family festival in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania coinciding with the unofficial start of the Christmas holiday shopping season. Many retailers in Downtown Pittsburgh remain open late, and street vendors and other concessionaires sell food and give away hot beverages, treats and promotional items. The city is decorated with Christmas lights, trees, among other holiday decorations. On Light Up Night, the skyscrapers and buildings in and around downtown keep their lights on throughout the night, lending to the name. Over 200,000 people attend the festivities.
Light Up Night is also a time for free music, including many choirs, street performers, and even rock concerts, downtown and in Station Square. In addition, the city offers free carriage rides downtown.
The event was held in November on the Friday before Thanksgiving until 2019, then on the Saturday before Thanksgiving from 2021.
With the increasing popularity of the event, The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership has threatened to sue other communities and organizations that fail to pay a licensing fee for trademark infringement.
Traditions
Lightings
The lighting of the Christmas tree in the ice skating rink in PPG Place is an annual tradition.
“Light Up Night” enters the record as festival in Pittsburgh. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Light, Night and Festival can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Light Up Night” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.