What's on around Chicago in December 2026

The Bears host Green Bay at noon on Christmas Day at Soldier Field, and the game goes out on Netflix. In more than a century of football the team has never played on Thanksgiving and on Christmas in the same regular season, and this year it does both. Four of the area's big light displays stay open past New Year's Day: ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo, Lightscape in Glencoe, Illumination in Lisle and Holiday Magic in Brookfield all run into the first days of January. Christkindlmarket goes the other way and closes on Christmas Eve.

I'm Jeff Moran, NMLS #483943, a mortgage broker licensed in Illinois through C2 Financial Corporation, and I have been in the mortgage business since 1996. Every date below comes from the organizer, the venue, the city that runs it or the visitor bureau that lists it, as each one has published it for this season. Anything I could only find on a previous year's listing was left out of the dated list and named near the bottom instead. I checked all of it on October 25, 2026. If you are looking at homes anywhere from the city out to Kendall County this winter, the Chicago area buyer's guide covers the nine counties on the Illinois side.

The Bears are home twice, and one of those is Christmas Day

Jacksonville comes in on Sunday, December 6 at noon on FOX, and Green Bay on Friday, December 25, also at noon, on Netflix. The Bears' own schedule page carries both, and Fox 32's writeup of the schedule release is where the Thanksgiving and Christmas pairing was called a first for the franchise. The other two December games are on the road, at Miami on the 13th and at Buffalo on the 19th. Lake Shore Drive and the Museum Campus lots fill early for a home game, and Christmas Day is a travel day for a lot of families on top of that.

Christkindlmarket closes on Christmas Eve

The market is in its 30th season this year and all three locations close on Thursday, December 24. NBC Chicago published the hours and the locations in August: Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 9 p.m., with a short day on Christmas Eve. Admission is free at Daley Plaza in the Loop, at Gallagher Way in Wrigleyville and at RiverEdge Park in Aurora, and the Aurora market runs Thursday through Sunday rather than daily.

The light displays, and how far into January each one runs

ZooLights runs through Sunday, January 3 at Lincoln Park Zoo. Choose Chicago's listings for the individual December nights put the hours at 4:30 to 9 p.m. Monday nights are free with registration, except for December 21 and December 28. The zoo itself is free to walk into year round, and ZooLights is a ticketed evening event, so the dated tickets come from the zoo's own page.

Lightscape is in Glencoe and runs on select dates through Sunday, January 3. Visit Lake County's listing and the Illinois Office of Tourism's page for it agree on that window. Not every night inside the run is open, and the tickets are timed, so the garden's own calendar is the one to look at before driving up there.

Illumination at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle goes to Saturday, January 2, in its 14th season. The Arboretum's own announcement counts 22 displays along the walk and says public tickets went on sale on October 15. The same announcement adds a daytime model train called the Pine Whistle Railroad, which keeps running after Illumination closes, through Saturday, February 13, 2027.

Holiday Magic at Brookfield Zoo Chicago runs on select nights to Sunday, January 3, and Visit Chicago Southland's listing and the Illinois tourism listing above both put it in that window. The nights inside the run are not every night of the month, and the zoo's own holiday page is where this year's calendar is posted.

The city's 113th Christmas tree was lit in Millennium Park on November 20, and Choose Chicago's listing for the lighting says the tree is on display through January 10, 2027. That makes it a free stop all month, and it is a short walk from the Loop market at Daley Plaza.

The Winter Flower Show at the Garfield Park Conservatory

The conservatory's own flower show page puts this winter's show at November 25 through January 3, with the rest of the details still to come. In recent years the show has been free with a reservation, and the conservatory is one of the few warm places on this list where nobody needs a coat.

The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol twice, and the Grinch

The Joffrey Ballet brings The Nutcracker back to the Lyric Opera House from Friday, December 4 through Sunday, December 27, with the Lyric Opera Orchestra playing the score live. Choose Chicago's listings for the run describe the production the way the Joffrey does, set on Christmas Eve in 1892 in a working-class immigrant community getting ready for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

The Goodman is running its 49th annual A Christmas Carol in the Albert Theatre on North Dearborn through Thursday, December 31. BroadwayWorld's cast announcement in October names Tim Hopper as the new Scrooge, with Rom Barkhordar taking the role for ten performances, in Tom Creamer's adaptation directed by Malkia Stampley.

The Grinch comes to the James M. Nederlander Theatre on Randolph for a short run. Broadway in Chicago's show page lists performances from Wednesday, December 9 to Sunday, December 27, and puts the show at 85 minutes with no intermission. Choose Chicago's version of the listing starts the run a day later, on the 10th, so the theater's own page is the one I would trust for the opening night.

Out in Aurora, the Paramount Theatre is staging a world premiere version of A Christmas Carol, adapted and directed by Trent Stork, with dance numbers and live music. BroadwayWorld reported the dates in October as previews from November 11, opening night on November 20, and a run through Sunday, January 3. Shaw Local listed it in January when the theater announced its 15th Broadway season. Holiday performance times move around, so the Paramount's own calendar is where the December schedule lives.

Holiday trains in Union

The Illinois Railway Museum in Union, out in McHenry County, runs the Happy Holiday Railway on ten dates this season. The museum's own event listing has the December dates as the weekends of the 5th and 6th, the 12th and 13th, and the 19th and 20th, plus Monday the 21st. The three dates before those are Black Friday weekend in November. Departures start at 11:30 a.m. and the museum asks riders to arrive half an hour before the one on their ticket. Two of the museum's pages disagree about the last departure of the day, so the ticket page is the one that settles it.

The overnight parking ban starts December 1

Chicago's winter overnight parking ban comes on by the calendar rather than by the weather. The city's own winter parking page says it covers 107 miles of arterial streets, meaning the main through routes, from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., December 1 through April 1, whether or not any snow has fallen. Signs are posted on those routes permanently, and the city puts flyers on cars parked along them shortly before it starts. The same page lists what a tow costs between the towing fee, the ticket and the daily storage charge, and names the pounds at 10301 S. Doty Avenue and 701 N. Sacramento.

A second ban covers about 500 miles of other main streets, and that one can be switched on at any hour of the day once two inches of snow are on the street. If you are closing on a home here in the next few weeks and your street is one of those, that rule is worth looking up before the moving truck shows up. Relocating to another state with a mortgage covers the paperwork side of a winter move.

Events I could not confirm for this year

Nine things that show up on December lists around here are not in the dated list above, because the organizer had not published this year's date when I checked. The Millennium Park Holiday Sing-Along, the Daley Plaza menorah lighting and the New Year's Eve fireworks at Navy Pier are all in that group. So are the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink in Millennium Park and the Maggie Daley Park skating ribbon, which both opened in November in past seasons. The Lincoln Park Conservatory's winter flower show has no dates posted for this winter, and neither does Christmas Around the World at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which ran into early January last season.

Green City Market's indoor winter season has no dates posted either, and its listing says this winter's are still to be announced. The market has also bought a building on West Montrose in Lincoln Square to be its permanent indoor home, and whether this season runs there or stays in Avondale is not settled in anything I could read. The Geneva Christmas Walk and the Renegade Craft holiday market round out the list.

New around the area this year

IBM is adding 750 jobs on the South Side. Capitol News Illinois and NPR Illinois both covered the April 29 announcement of a center at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, with the hiring spread over five years in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data science and quantum work. The state is putting $19 million in tax credits behind it over ten years, and City Colleges of Chicago is running an apprenticeship that feeds it. A job that starts here changes which documents a lender reads on your file, and an underwriter reads a salaried offer letter differently from a year of self-employment. Getting pre-approved in Illinois covers what gets reviewed before anybody writes a letter, and self-employed mortgages in Illinois covers the tax return side of it.

Transit fares are frozen into the middle of next year. The Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act holds every fare where it is until at least July 1, 2027, and the RTA formally became NITA on September 1. The CTA's announcement with Metra and Pace set student fares on CTA and Pace at 75 cents a ride from the August school year. That fare is good at any hour, year round, and transfers between the two agencies are free inside two hours. Metra kept its own reduced fare for K-12 students. Mass Transit's piece on the transition walks through what the new agency took over. The freeze means the train and bus line in your monthly budget stays where it is through the middle of next year, so comparing two suburbs this winter comes down to the homes and the tax bills.

The I-80 rebuild through Joliet gives a lane back this month. IDOT's own notice narrowed U.S. 6 to one lane each way from July 15, between McDonough Street and just east of Brandon Road. Crews needed the room to build a new pier for the I-80 bridge over U.S. 6 and the Des Plaines River. Those lanes are expected back by the end of this year. Shaw Local reported in February that about 60 percent of the interstate was substantially complete, with nearly 80 percent expected by year end. The same report has traffic moving onto the new westbound bridges in early 2028 and onto the eastbound bridges late that year. The project's own site at i80will.org is where current closures are posted.

Common questions

What is open around Chicago on Christmas Day 2026?

The Bears host Green Bay at Soldier Field at noon, and the game is on Netflix. Christkindlmarket closed the day before, on Christmas Eve. The Goodman's A Christmas Carol runs through December 31 and the Joffrey's Nutcracker through December 27, and the four light displays all continue past Christmas into January. Several of them have closed on Christmas itself in past years, so each one's own calendar is where to settle that before you drive out.

When does Christkindlmarket close in 2026?

Thursday, December 24, at all three locations, on a short day. The Loop market is at Daley Plaza, the Wrigleyville market is at Gallagher Way, and the Aurora market is at RiverEdge Park. Admission is free at all three, and the market's own Daley Plaza page carries the daily hours.

Which Chicago holiday light displays are open in January?

Four of them. ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo, Lightscape in Glencoe and Holiday Magic at Brookfield Zoo Chicago all go to January 3, and Illumination in Lisle goes to January 2. The Winter Flower Show at the Garfield Park Conservatory also runs to January 3, and the city's tree in Millennium Park is on display to January 10.

When is the Joffrey Ballet's Nutcracker in 2026?

Friday, December 4 through Sunday, December 27 at the Lyric Opera House on North Upper Wacker, with the Lyric Opera Orchestra playing live. The production is set in Chicago in 1892, in a community preparing for the World's Columbian Exposition.

When does the Chicago winter overnight parking ban start?

December 1, and it runs through April 1 on 107 miles of arterial streets, from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., whether or not it has snowed. A separate ban on about 500 miles of other main streets can be switched on at any hour once two inches of snow are on the street.

Are these events all inside the City of Chicago?

Several are not. Lightscape is in Glencoe, Illumination is in Lisle, Holiday Magic is in Brookfield, the holiday trains run in Union out in McHenry County, and the Paramount is in Aurora. The county a home is in changes its tax bill and its school district here, and a few towns cross county lines, so a mailing address will not settle which is which. The Chicago area buyer's guide walks through that county by county.

I am moving to the Chicago area this winter. Where should I start?

You'll want to start with which county the home is in, because Cook County is assessed on a different cycle from the eight other counties on the Illinois side. The school district moves the tax bill as much as the county does. The Illinois page covers the statewide rules, including the attorney review period that follows a contract here. Two more are worth reading once you are under contract: the Illinois homeowner exemption after you buy and the village transfer stamp some towns require before closing, which catches clients moving in from another state. Then please give me a call and tell me which towns you are looking in, and I can tell you what your numbers look like in each of them.