About 800,000 people every year make a visit to Plaza de Cesar Chavez in downtown San Jose part of their holiday tradition.
Of course, it’s not to visit the “Plumed Serpent” statue or relax on a bench overlooking the Tech Interactive. No, for five weeks spanning Thanksgiving weekend to New Year’s Day, the two-acre park’s biggest draw for nearly 50 years has been Christmas in the Park — a kitschy and whimsical collection of animatronic displays, hundreds of decorated trees and a chance to visit with Santa himself.
Ted Lopez, who took over in August 2025 as executive director of Christmas in the Park, said his own family has had a Christmas in the Park tradition as long as he can remember. “We always have to take a photo under the big tree,” he said. “That’s just a staple of the holidays for us.”
Christmas in the Park and Plaza de Cesar Chavez seem made for each other, and it’s probably difficult for anyone under the age of 50 to imagine a holiday season at the park without it (though that sadly happened during the first COVID-19 winter of 2020, prompting the creation of the drive-through event that continues today at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds).
South Bay residents who go farther back than that can remember the years when the display was installed on the lawn in front of the old San Jose City Hall on North First Street for a few years in the 1970s. And some still have fond memories of when everything was still on Willow Street, decorating the Lima Family mortuary every year from 1950 to 1969. They may have less fond memories of the enormous traffic jams it caused, which was part of the reason Don Lima donated the whole thing to the city in 1970.
City leaders did their best Scrooge impression in 1978, insisting that recently passed tax measure Prop. 13 made installing a joyful but ultimately extraneous holiday display in the park a low priority, budget-wise. Volunteers offered to set everything up in 1979, but city unions decided that holiday gift wasn’t to their liking and the parks department didn’t bother to order any artificial snow. Bah, humbug, indeed.
In March of 1980, then-City Councilmember Tom McEnery penned a piece in the Mercury News urging the city to start planning early to stage the event and to avail itself of private philanthropy to keep it going. It worked, and Christmas in the Park – as it became officially known in 1982 – became an institution.
When the Great Recession again forced the city to tighten its belt, volunteers formed a nonprofit organization to keep the event alive – and actually did a lot more than that. They grew the event through corporate partnerships and kept it feeling local by continuing to provide a community stage for nightly entertainment.
The “Enchanted Forest” of about 600 trees continues to be decorated by Santa Clara County companies, schools, scouting units and other community organizations, including – to the amusement of some, and dismay of others – the Satanic Temple of Silicon Valley for several years.
For many, Christmas in the Park’s displays of elves rescuing a stuck Santa from a chimney, the one-room schoolhouse or the Nativity scene seem like they’ve all been there forever, unchanging in our memories. But the park – and the display – have undergone lots of changes over the years.
Very few of today’s displays predate the 1990s, with some being renovated over the years to either spruce them up or change their theme. The “Children All Over the World” display went from being a ripoff of “It’s a Small World” to having an environmental theme with a paint makeover and new recycling vests for the “kids.”
The Lima train was built in 1994 to honor Christmas in the Park’s founding family. The Willow Street display included a miniature train, and the “new” nonmoving train includes parts of some original artifacts from those days. Every year, there’s either a new display or a refurbished one to find.
And while the park itself hasn’t grown, Christmas in the Park’s footprint sure has. A vendor village was created at the south end of the park, joining the Kiwanis Club booth that has long been staked out next to Santa’s house. The San Jose Downtown Association brought its Downtown Ice skating rink to the adjacent Circle of Palms, and the Winter Wonderland carnival rides added to the fun along Park Avenue and Paseo de San Antonio.
Lopez, Christmas in the Park’s executive director, says his job is to keep that holiday tradition going and to give people a happy reason to come back every year. “To me, Christmas in the Park is an amusement park that’s open for 35 days,” he said.