One of Those Christmas Light Displays Is Free. The Other Is $30.

Event details below are from the 2025-26 season. Dates, hours and prices change every year — check before you go.

One of the two light displays I recommended is free and the other costs about $30 a vehicle. I presented them as roughly interchangeable — "both are very comparable... regardless, you're not going to go wrong" — and that's the detail most likely to matter if you're loading kids into a car on a December evening.

Here's the corrected version of everything I named, because I garbled most of the names.

Lights of the Ozarks, Fayetteville

Correct name: Lights of the Ozarks, currently presented as Lights of the Ozarks Powered by SWEPCO. I called it "lighting the Ozarks." It's on the Fayetteville square, run by the city, and 2025 was its 32nd year.

The 2025 season ran November 21 through January 1, free, open nightly until 1 a.m. I said "hundreds and thousands of lights strung across all of the square." It's about 500,000 LED lights across roughly 5,000 strands, so I was under by a good margin.

The scheduling change worth knowing about: for the second year running, the parade has been separated from the lighting ceremony. Light Night opened the season on November 21; the parade ran separately on Thursday, December 4 at 6:30 p.m., along East Avenue, clockwise around the square and north on Block Avenue.

I described the ceremony and the parade as one experience. They're two nights now. If you're planning around one, check which one you're planning around.

Lighting of the Square, Bentonville

Correct name: the City of Bentonville's Lighting of the Square, organized by Downtown Bentonville Inc. In 2025 it ran Saturday, November 22 from 4 to 8 p.m., with Santa photos from 5 to 7 and a Broadway-style Christmas show. City Parks and Recreation hangs more than 30 miles of lights for it.

I said "the Grinch comes out, Santa Claus comes out" at the lighting ceremonies. Santa is confirmed. I couldn't verify the Grinch at Bentonville's event — but the Grinch does appear at the Stewart Family display on weekend nights, so I suspect I merged two events in my head.

The two drive-through displays — and the price difference

Stewart Family Christmas Light Display. I called it "the Steuart family Christmas lights." It's Stewart, at 4279 E. Wyman Road on the east side of Fayetteville, which is where I placed it.

This is the big one: about 6 million lights, and it's free. You can drive through or walk through. Santa is there nightly, the Grinch on weekend nights, plus inflatables and train, pony and camel rides. The 2025 season ran November 15 through January 3 — Sunday through Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 4:30 to 11. Reporting on the display puts its start at 2013, with one season off in 2019.

The Light Show NWA. I called it "the Washington County Fairgrounds has a fantastic Christmas lighting." The venue is right — Washington County Fairgrounds at 2537 N. McConnell Avenue — but it has a name: The Light Show NWA, previously marketed as Magical Lights Adventure. Nearly a million lights, 20-foot light trees, a 300-foot light tunnel, singing and dancing characters.

It is ticketed: roughly $30 per vehicle, or $75 for a season pass.

So my comparison needs redoing. I said the Washington County one is "a little bit easier to get in and out of and a little bit longer," and the Stewart one is "more mature and more diverse — they have a ton of lights." The lights part is right and then some: six million versus about one million. What I left out is that the bigger display is the free one.

That doesn't mean skip The Light Show NWA. A polished, produced, drive-at-your-own-pace show with a light tunnel is a different product from a family's yard display, and $30 for a carload is reasonable for it. But "both are very comparable" isn't accurate when one has a gate price and one doesn't, and you should know which is which before you go.

The Rink at Lawrence Plaza

I said "Bentonville has their ice skating stuff going up there." It's The Rink at Lawrence Plaza, at 214 NE A Street — a 7,000-square-foot permanent outdoor rink, described as the region's only permanent outdoor rink, and it's real chilled ice, not synthetic.

The 2025-26 season opened November 22 and runs through February 13. Admission is $7 a session, skate rental included. That's a genuinely cheap night out and I should have given people the number.

The parades: more of them than I said

I said "a lot of different cities have their own, but really the biggest ones again are going to be Bentonville as well as Fayetteville."

Here's the full 2025 slate, and it undercuts my framing:

• Springdale — Christmas Parade of the Ozarks, November 30
• Fayetteville — Lights of the Ozarks Parade, December 4
• Eureka Springs — Christmas Parade of Lights, December 5
• Rogers — Rogers Christmas Parade, December 5
• Siloam Springs — Light Up Siloam Springs Parade, December 7
• Bentonville — Bentonville Christmas Parade, December 13, with 100-plus floats

Every city in the region has one. Most fall on different nights — Eureka Springs and Rogers both landed on December 5, so those two conflict — which means you could reasonably catch three or four in a season. That's a better piece of advice than picking two.

It also weakens something else I said. I claimed people travel "from Springdale, from Siloam Springs, from Eureka Springs" to see the Bentonville and Fayetteville ceremonies. Some surely do. But all three of those towns have their own parade and their own holiday programming — Eureka Springs also runs Santa's Mountain Village and a Holly Route trolley — so the picture of outlying towns emptying out toward the two big cities isn't right. I couldn't find published attendance figures for any of these events either way.

Two things I said that I can't back up. I said the parades are "often times actually pushed out on the local news" so people can watch from home. I found no confirmation that either parade is broadcast. And I said they last "usually about an hour or more" — I couldn't verify a duration for either.

Two claims that were just enthusiasm

I said hiring a company to install your Christmas lights is "very common here. Not sure if it's common by you." It looks like a national trend rather than a local one — industry estimates put professional holiday light installation somewhere around an $8 billion US market. Local installers exist here, which proves the service is available, not that Northwest Arkansas is unusual. I found no data comparing how common it is here against anywhere else. My "not sure if it's common by you" hedge was doing the right work; the answer is that it probably is.

And I said "so many people travel across America" for the holiday season here. I couldn't find any data breaking out November and December visitation for this region, or tying it to these events. The state tourism department reported roughly 52 million visitors and $10.3 billion in visitor spending statewide for 2024 — but that's the whole state, all year, and 2025 showed softening tourism tax revenue and hotel occupancy. So treat my line as enthusiasm rather than reporting.

What holds up entirely

The events are real, they're well run, and the case I made for going in person rather than watching — "you get to meet new people, if you have kids there'll be plenty of kids to meet, you're probably going to see people from your school system there, all the teachers" — is the actual reason to go, and no fact-check touches it.

I'd also keep the honest limit I put on the whole thing: "we don't necessarily have the skyscraping mountains of ice, like snow caps obviously, but we definitely have the people, we have the lights, we have the parades, we have the ice skating." That's the right expectation to set.