Lights in the Parkway 2026: Allentown's Drive-Through Light Show

Quick answer: The 30th Lights in the Parkway runs Friday, November 27, 2026, through Wednesday, January 6, 2027, in Allentown's Lehigh Parkway. The City of Allentown says it is closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. Discover Lehigh Valley lists the drive-through at 5:30 to 10 p.m., with advance tickets only: $16 per car for up to 8 people, and $26 for a commercial van, limo, or minibus under 14 feet. The city page itself does not print that vehicle price. Six Mondays are walk, run, and bike nights with no reservation.

Checked October 22, 2026. Dates, the Monday calendar, the quarter-million-light description, and the four closed nights come from the city page linked above. The street address, the 5:30 to 10 p.m. drive-through hours, and the $16 and $26 prices come from Discover Lehigh Valley's event listing, also linked above. The 5K date, time, place, and $45 fee come from the RunSignup registration page. Where those sources disagree, this guide follows the city page and says so.

Key takeaways:

• Season: November 27, 2026, through January 6, 2027. This is the 30th year.
• Closed: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.
• Tickets: Advance and online. Discover Lehigh Valley lists $16 per car (up to 8 people) and $26 for a commercial van, limo, or minibus under 14 feet. No on-site cash or credit sales, according to that listing.
• Walk nights: November 30, December 7, December 14, December 21, December 28, and January 4, from 5:30 to 10 p.m. The city says no reservation is required.
• 5K: Wednesday, November 25, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. The registration page showed $45 on October 22, 2026.

At a glance: dates, hours, price, and address

Lights in the Parkway is a City of Allentown display along Lehigh Parkway, not a ticketed show inside a building. You stay in the car on drive-through nights. On six Mondays the city opens the same route to people on foot, on a run, or on a bike.

Item	What the sources say	Where we read it
Dates	November 27, 2026, through January 6, 2027	City of Allentown, October 22, 2026
Closed nights	Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day	City of Allentown, October 22, 2026
Drive-through hours	5:30 to 10 p.m.	Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026. The city page prints 5:30 to 10 p.m. for Monday walk nights and does not separately print drive-through hours.
Car price	$16, up to 8 people, advance online	Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026. Not printed on the city page that day.
Van, limo, or minibus under 14 feet	$26	Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026
Large bus	No price printed	City page and Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026
Address on the event listing	1700 Martin Luther King Blvd., Allentown, PA 18103	Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026
Phone on that listing	(610) 841-3506	Discover Lehigh Valley, October 22, 2026
Length of the display	More than a mile, lit by a quarter-million lights	City of Allentown, October 22, 2026

Little Lehigh Creek in Lehigh Parkway, 2022. Photo by Atwngirl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How tickets work

Buy before you leave home. Discover Lehigh Valley's listing, checked October 22, 2026, says advanced tickets are required and must be purchased online before you arrive at Lehigh Parkway. It also says no cash or credit sales will be accepted on site. That is the whole gate rule we could verify: there is no on-site sale to fall back on if the online ticket is missing.

The same listing prices a car at $16 for the entire family, up to 8 passengers in the vehicle. A commercial van, a limo, or a minibus under 14 feet is $26. We did not find a published price for a larger bus on the city page or on the Discover Lehigh Valley listing. If that is the vehicle you are bringing, ask the city at events@allentownpa.gov before you assume the $26 rate covers it. The city page says ticket proceeds benefit local non-profit organizations. It does not name a checkout website. On October 22, 2026 the city page we opened had no "buy tickets" button in the article text, so use the city page as the place to confirm the current seller before you pay anyone else.

Count the people in the car against the "up to 8" line before you buy one car ticket for a full van. The $26 category is defined by the vehicle, not by a head count: commercial vans, limos, and minibuses under 14 feet. A regular passenger car with fewer than 8 people is the $16 ticket on the tourism listing. We are not going to guess what happens if a ninth person is in a sedan. The published cap is 8.

The city page and the tourism listing do not print a per-person price, a child price, or a senior price for the drive-through. The unit is the vehicle. Do not budget from an older year's flyer if it does not match these two pages.

Getting there, and what Lehigh Parkway is the rest of the year

The event address published by Discover Lehigh Valley is 1700 Martin Luther King Blvd., Allentown, Pennsylvania 18103. The same listing gives the phone number (610) 841-3506. Our own park page lists Lehigh Parkway at Lehigh Parkway East, Allentown, PA 18103, and describes creek-side running and biking trails, a covered bridge, a free lot, and a park that is open 24 hours outside of special events. That page is the park. This guide is the winter display that uses the park.

The city Lights page we opened on October 22, 2026 does not print turn-by-turn entrance directions, and it does not say whether the drive is one-way. We are not going to invent an entrance. Start from the published address, follow the signs and the staff who are actually on the road that night, and read the city's own page again the week you go. The city's article does link out to street closures, a frequently asked questions note, and parking for the Monday walks. Those links were on the page. The closure text itself was not in the article body we saved, so we are not summarizing a detour we did not read.

The 5K, which is two nights before the drive-through opens, has its own parking rules. Those rules are for the race, not for a December drive-through. They are in the 5K section below. Do not mix them.

The rest of the year, Lehigh Parkway is one of the long green corridors in the city. For the wider set of city parks, including Cedar Beach, see parks in Allentown and the Allentown parks rankings. Cedar Beach Park is the other large Allentown park in that directory if the night you picked is one of the four closures.

What is new in the 30th season

The city calls this the 30th annual display and ties it to the end of the nation's 250th anniversary year. The page describes a patriotic section with an American eagle and red, white, and blue lights, plus new displays to look for: a skyscraper display, and a separate community display made with the Parknership. It also says the route is more than a mile of Lehigh Parkway, "illuminated by a quarter-million dazzling lights."

Discover Lehigh Valley's listing uses different light counts in the same article: "175,000-200,000 twinkling string lights and over 90,000 illuminated bulbs," and it also calls the route a "one-mile journey." Those figures do not match the city's "quarter-million" and "more than a mile." Use the city page for the size of the display. We are not averaging the two.

The tourism listing also has a line that says Move it Mondays start December 30. The city page, and a later sentence on the same tourism listing, both schedule Monday nights from November 30. The December 30 start line is the stale one. The Monday table below follows the city.

Monday walk nights, and the 2026 themes

On Mondays the city invites people to walk, run, or bike through the lights from 5:30 to 10 p.m. No reservation is required. The page calls the series Mondays at Lights in the Parkway and says the nights include partnerships with local groups, plus Santa's Mailbox for letters to Santa. The city page does not print a separate Monday ticket price. We are not calling the walk free, because the city sentence we could verify is about reservations, not about a $0 fare. Discover Lehigh Valley does use the word "free" in a paragraph that also says Mondays start December 30, which conflicts with the city calendar, so that word is not the one we are using.

Date	Theme	What the city page adds
Monday, November 30, 2026	30th anniversary	Horse and carriage rides, with more details to follow, and live entertainment by a True Love Story.
Monday, December 7, 2026	Hanukkah	In partnership with the Jewish Community Center of the Lehigh Valley.
Monday, December 14, 2026	Polar Express	A Polar Express experience and a movie in the park, the movie "The Polar Express." More details to follow.
Monday, December 21, 2026	Christmas	Santa and his reindeer, a Letters to Santa station with Bill Rhodes of the Board of Recreation, and live entertainment by a True Love Story.
Monday, December 28, 2026	Kwanzaa	In partnership with Resurrected Life Community Church.
Monday, January 4, 2027	Three Kings	A live nativity and a live parranda, in partnership with La Mega, ICDI, United Way, and PRCP, plus live entertainment by a True Love Story.

Horse-and-carriage details and the December 14 movie details were both marked "more details to follow" on the city page. Do not plan a carriage time or a movie start time from this guide. Recheck the city page that week. The other theme lines above are the partnerships and the entertainment names the city already printed.

Monday, December 21, is a walk night and it is not Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the closure. December 28 is also a Monday walk night, after the holiday closure. January 4 is the last Monday theme night. The drive-through season itself continues through January 6, which is a Wednesday.

Lights in the Parkway 5K

The 5K is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which in 2026 is November 25, and it is not the opening night of the drive-through. The drive-through opens November 27. The registration page on RunSignup lists the race at 7:00 p.m. EST and puts the place at 1680 Park Drive, Allentown, PA 18103. On October 22, 2026 that page showed a price of $45 and said the price increases after October 29, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. EDT. The higher price was not written out in the page text we saved, so we are not quoting a late fee. A live spots-left counter moves. The cap does not: the page says registration sells out at 1,200 runners, and it says the event has sold out five years in a row.

What the fee includes, in the page's own description, is a view of the light display on foot, a long-sleeved event t-shirt, and hot chocolate and cookies after the race. Shirts are guaranteed if you register by November 6. Names are printed on the bib if you register by October 29. The race is chip-timed by Second Wind Race Timing. Ornaments go to the top 50 finishers in three categories, men, women, and kids 12 and under, based on chip time, and they must be picked up after the race. They are not shipped. The page says a rain or snow date is still to be determined, and that it only comes into play in extreme circumstances when the city closes the park.

Parking for the 5K is its own problem. The registration page says parking is at a premium, asks people to arrive early and carpool, and says there is no parking within the Parkway. Cars enter off Lehigh Street to Vultee, keep moving until a staff member directs them, and park facing the same direction on both sides of the road. The page also says there is a decent walk from that parking to the start. That is the race. It is not a description of December drive-through parking, which the city page did not spell out in the article we read.

A city special-events listing retrieved on October 22, 2026 also shows "25 Nov 2026 Lights in the Parkway 5k" at 7:00 p.m. at Lehigh Parkway. That calendar page is separate from the registration form. Use the RunSignup page for the fee.

Make a night of it: dinner in Allentown

The light display starts at 5:30 p.m. on the tourism listing, so an early dinner is the practical order: eat, then drive. These three are already in our restaurant directory. Hours and prices below are the directory's own fields, last checked in October 2026, not a new visit to each dining room. Holiday weeks change hours. Open the listing before you go. None of these sentences is a claim about how many minutes the restaurant sits from the parkway. We did not measure that drive.

Amigos Mexican Grill is at 932 Hamilton St, Allentown, PA 18101, on Hamilton Street in central Allentown. The directory lists it at one dollar sign, with lunch and dinner, dine-in, takeout, and delivery. Directory hours are Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. to midnight and Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. A Sunday session is not in that hours field. The directory lists 5.0 stars across 3,915 Google reviews.

Youell's Oyster House is at 2249 W Walnut St, Allentown, PA 18104. The directory calls it a seafood restaurant with a rooftop garden, lunch and dinner, takeout, and reservations, at two dollar signs. Directory hours are Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. On a weeknight that 8:30 p.m. close is before the lights end at 10 p.m., so this is a before-the-drive dinner, not a meal after the last car. The directory lists 4.6 stars across 2,523 Google reviews.

Union and Finch is at 1528 W Union St, Allentown, PA 18102, a seasonal American bistro at three dollar signs. Directory hours start on Tuesday: Tuesday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday is not in the hours field, and Monday is a walk night at the parkway, so this is not the listing to plan a Monday around unless the restaurant's own site says otherwise that week. The directory lists 4.5 stars across 1,989 Google reviews.

For a longer list of dinner hours, including which rooms are open late and which ones take reservations, use dinner in Allentown. The city index is Best of Allentown, and the full restaurant set is Allentown restaurants.

The Allentown tree lighting, and the zoo's walk-through lights

The tree lighting is a different city event, downtown, not a night inside Lehigh Parkway. A city special-events listing retrieved on October 22, 2026 shows a Tree Lighting Ceremony on Saturday, December 5, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. at Allentown Arts Park, 24-32 N 5th Street. Confirm it on the city's special events calendar before you go. December 5 is a Saturday during the parkway season. It is not one of the six Monday walk nights, and it is not one of the four closure nights.

The other large holiday-light event in the Valley this season is the Lehigh Valley Zoo Winter Light Spectacular in Schnecksville. On lvzoo.org, the zoo lists it as the 13th year, running November 13, 2026, through January 2, 2027, across 37 published dates rather than every night. It is a walk-through at the zoo, with its own ticket table. It is not a second night of Lights in the Parkway, and it is not in Allentown. The zoo's published schedule skips Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, and it does list New Year's Day, January 1, at 5 to 8 p.m. Read the current calendar on lvzoo.org before you treat any night as open.

What we left out on purpose

We did not publish a wait time, a "best night," or an attendance figure. None of those are on the city page or the tourism listing we checked. We did not publish a drive time in minutes. The only length the city states is more than a mile. We did not publish a large-bus fare. We did not publish turn-by-turn entrance directions, because the city article did not contain them. We did not publish a Monday walk price, because the city sentence is about not needing a reservation. We did not publish the 5K price after October 29, because the registration page said the price increases and did not print the new number in the text we saved.

The city page thanks sponsors from the 2025 season and tells anyone who wants to sponsor this year to email events@allentownpa.gov. Those 2025 names are last year's list. They are not repeated here as a 2026 sponsor roster.