For most of three generations, Atlanta had one tree.
Not a tree in your living room. The tree. The one families drove to see on a specific night because that was the night everybody went.
The tradition began at Rich’s downtown in 1948. When the store closed in 1991, the Great Tree moved to Underground Atlanta and later to Macy’s at Lenox Square.
The final Lenox lighting happened in 2022. Macy’s confirmed the following December that it had retired the tradition after 74 years.
Four Decembers after that final ceremony, Piedmont Park is adding a lantern parade to the replacement tradition it launched last year.
What happens on Nov. 22
The Piedmont Park Conservancy’s Light Up the Season runs from Nov. 22, 2026, through Jan. 4, 2027.
The free kickoff begins Sunday, Nov. 22, at Greystone with a lantern-making party at 3:30 p.m. The Holiday Lantern Parade steps off at 5 p.m.
Led by the Seed & Feed band, the route circles Lake Clara Meer before entering the Meadow for the lighting of the park’s Great Tree, Menorah and Kinara.
Afterward, Park Tavern will host a family holiday movie and hot cocoa.
Advance registration is strongly encouraged because it helps the Conservancy plan for attendance, but people who have not registered may still walk up and participate. Lantern-making materials will be available while supplies last.
The Conservancy recommends arriving by foot, bicycle, rideshare, public transportation or the Beltline. Paid parking is available at Midtown Promenade and the shared Piedmont Park and Atlanta Botanical Garden parking facility, but spaces are expected to be limited.
The parade is one night. The lights stay longer.
If Nov. 22 is already spoken for, the three displays will remain illuminated each evening through Jan. 4.
That distinction matters. The parade is the event. The lights are available for six weeks.
The practical appeal is straightforward: the kickoff is free, the schedule is public and the route follows paved areas through a park connected to Midtown neighborhoods and the Beltline.
What remains to be seen is whether people treat the second year as the beginning of an annual tradition.
A one-time lighting becomes something larger when the people who attended the first year return with somebody else.
What changed from 2025
The first Light Up the Season was held Nov. 23, 2025. A 50-foot Christmas tree, Hanukkah menorah and Kwanzaa kinara stood together in the Meadow.
The lighting ceremony was the display’s only public-facing event that year.
Piedmont Park Conservancy CEO Doug Widener described 2025 as a test run. “The goal this year is to get it off the ground,” he said at the time.
He also described plans to build programming around the display and connect it with the holiday activity already surrounding the park, including ice skating at Park Tavern and Garden Lights at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
Twelve months later, the Conservancy has added lantern-making, a parade route, music and a post-lighting gathering.
The Piedmont Park display is not the former Macy’s tree moved to a new address. The Conservancy commissioned its own displays. But the organization has openly positioned the park as a new home for the communal tradition Atlanta lost when the Lenox ceremony ended.
Lanterns have ended in this park before
Piedmont Park also has history with another Atlanta tradition.
The Atlanta Beltline Lantern Parade spent its first decade on the Eastside Trail. In 2019, the tenth parade began near Irwin Street and Lake Avenue and finished at Piedmont Park.
After a pandemic pause, organizers moved the event to the Southwest Trail in 2022. This year’s Beltline parade began near Beulah Colbert Park in Adair Park and ended at Lee + White.
The two lantern parades have different organizers and different routes. But the Beltline event offers a useful measuring stick. It began in 2010 with a few hundred people carrying handmade lanterns along a trail that was still taking shape. It became an event thousands of people plan around.
Piedmont Park already receives more than 6 million visitors annually for everyday recreation and major events. What it has not had recently is a free, recurring reason for Atlantans to gather there after dark in late November.
The Conservancy said out loud in 2025 that year one was about getting it off the ground and that programming would follow, and twelve months later there is a lantern parade on the calendar with a start time and a route. That is an organization doing the unglamorous thing of executing its own plan on schedule, and the scale of what it is reaching for is the part worth noticing: Atlanta carried one tree for 74 years and then carried none, and nobody owes this park the chance to rebuild that. If you want it to exist in five years, the move is small and specific. Register, show up at 3:30 and make the lantern, and bring somebody who remembers Rich's.
