Pacific Park To Display an 80-Foot Tall Snowman On Its Ferris Wheel For the Holiday Season

Every holiday season, Pacific Park lights the chilly December nights with fun and festive holiday icons and patterns on the world-famous Pacific Wheel Ferris wheel. The wheel’s 174,000 LEDs shine brilliantly over the Pacific’s rolling surf, and this year’s holiday light program will include animated snowflakes, reindeer with blinking noses, holiday emoji’s and an 80-foot tall snow man that waving cheerily from above the Pier. Check out all of the events happening around the holiday season for Cheer on the Pier. The lights go on nightly around dusk (4:30 PM) and run until 11:30 PM or later. If you can’t make it down to the Pier, check out the lights on our live-streaming web cams.

Pacific Park regularly programs the Ferris wheel to display seasonal programing and themed light designs for holidays and special occasions. The Pacific Wheel’s state-of-the-art lighting package was installed in 2016 and can display over 1.6 million different colors and animate patterns and icons in 24 frames per second. The energy efficient LEDs on the face of the Ferris wheel are powered by solar arrays inside Pacific Park. The light programs are curated and designed by Pacific Park staff. Each design is manually animated; some designs can take hours of programming. The aim is to provide fun, high-energy, and sometimes whimsical designs to entertain guests on the Santa Monica Pier and surrounding beaches.

The Ferris wheel’s light programs can be seen nightly lighting the waters around the Santa Monica Pier and are regularly featured in news broadcasts across the country. Pacific Park accepts special lighting requests from the public as part of a sponsorship arrangement with the Park. Because of the large volume of these requests, not all submissions can be met, and the Park no longer offers pro bono lighting requests. To learn more about these and other opportunities to partner with Pacific Park, please visit pacpark.com/sponsorships.