The Country Club Plaza Lighting Ceremony — Origin and Tradition

On December 25, 1925, a single string of colored lightbulbs was hung above a doorway of the Mill Creek Building on the Country Club Plaza by Charles “Pete” Pitrat, a maintenance supervisor for the J.C. Nichols Company. The improvised gesture became the seed of what is now one of the largest and longest-running outdoor holiday lighting traditions in the United States — a century of Plaza Lights anchoring Kansas City’s holiday civic life.

Summary

The Country Club Plaza Lighting Ceremony is an annual Thanksgiving-night event in which roughly 80 miles of colored lights outlining the rooflines, towers, parapets, and architectural details of the Country Club Plaza are switched on for the holiday season.¹ The lights burn nightly from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. across 15 blocks of the district, running from Thanksgiving through mid-January.²³

The tradition began informally on December 25, 1925, when Nichols Company maintenance supervisor Charles “Pete” Pitrat hung a string of lights over a doorway of the Mill Creek Building.⁴⁵ It was formalized as an annual Thanksgiving-night ceremony at the turn of the 1930s — see Dating the first formal ceremony for a live source conflict on whether that was 1929 or 1930.⁵⁶

The display has not run unbroken. The Plaza went dark during World War II (1942-1945), and the lights were switched off three days after the 1973 ceremony during the oil shock.⁵ Visit KC, by contrast, names 1973 as the only year the lights did not operate.² The modern ceremony draws crowds reported from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand and is broadcast live on Kansas City television.²⁷

Background

The Country Club Plaza

The Country Club Plaza (Country Club Plaza) was conceived by Jesse Clyde “J.C.” Nichols in 1912, when the Brush Creek valley was still marshland with a hog farm nearby. Nichols bet that the automobile, not the electric streetcar, would define future shopping, so the architects he hired — Edward Buehler Delk and George E. Kessler — planned wide streets and generous parking. Nichols announced the plans in 1922, to skeptics who called the scheme “Nichols’ folly.”⁴ The Plaza opened in 1923, two years before the first lights were hung.⁵

The Plaza’s architectural style was Spanish-Moorish Revival, and its buildings feature ornate towers, parapets, tilework, fountains, ironwork, and sculpted ornament — the surfaces the light display would later trace.]

Pitrat and the first lights

On December 25, 1925, “a string of Christmas lights hung over the doorway of the Mill Creek Building at the Country Club Plaza for the first time,” per the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections.⁴ Kansas City Magazine identifies the man who hung them as Charles Pitrat, a J.C. Nichols Company maintenance supervisor, and dates the act to two years after the Plaza opened.⁵ KCTV5 gives the same attribution.⁷

The strand is commonly described as 16 colored bulbs.⁸ The Plaza Lights are described by the Plaza’s own historians as the oldest continuous event on the Plaza, followed by the Plaza Bunnies in 1931.⁷

⚠ Correction of record. Earlier drafts of this page credited the first strand to a Nichols Company worker named “Bill Linder” and placed it above the Suydam Decorating Company building on Christmas Eve 1925. No source located supports any of those three claims. The sourced account is Charles “Pete” Pitrat, the Mill Creek Building, December 25.

Expansion (1928-1930)

1928 — Pitrat marked the opening of the Plaza Theater by stringing lights across 47th Street and several businesses’ storefronts, the first expansion beyond a single doorway.⁵
1929 or 1930 — the first formal Thanksgiving lighting ceremony (see below). The iconic building-outline pattern still used today was established at this point on roughly five Plaza buildings.⁵

By the early 1930s the tradition had taken its current basic form: lights outlining the rooflines and architectural ornament of Plaza buildings, switched on collectively at a single Thanksgiving-evening ceremony and left burning through the holiday season.

Dating the first formal ceremony

Two credible accounts conflict and this page records both rather than choosing:

1929. Kansas City Magazine’s centennial timeline places the first formal Plaza Lighting Ceremony on Thanksgiving 1929, the autumn of the stock-market crash.⁵
November 27, 1930. KCTV5, Visit KC, and The Kansas City Star all give 1930, with KCTV5 specifying November 27, 1930.⁶²⁸

The annual ordinal counts used by broadcasters are consistent with the 1930 date: the 2017 ceremony was billed as the 88th, the 2020 ceremony as the 91st, and the 2025 ceremony as the 96th.³¹² Note that those ordinals also count the interrupted years.

The modern ceremony

The night itself

The ceremony occurs on Thanksgiving evening. The 2025 program ran 6-8:30 p.m., with holiday music from 6, pre-lighting performances and giveaways from the main stage at 6:30, the 96th Annual Evergy Plaza Lighting Ceremony broadcast live on KMBC from 7 to 7:50, the flip of the switch at 7:55 p.m. followed by fireworks, and a post-ceremony show to 8:30.² The ceremony became a full-scale televised production for the first time in 1968.⁵

A designated honored guest throws a ceremonial switch — and per Visit KC, the big switch on the stage really does turn on all the lights, while the child chosen from the audience to help is picked at random.² Documented switch-throwers include:

1978 — Angela O’Brien of Independence, with anchorman Scott Feldman and Royals pitcher Paul Splittorff⁸
1998 — Kansas City native and actor Paul Rudd⁵
2017 — Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith and linebacker Derrick Johnson³
2019 — Kansas City native and Saturday Night Live cast member Heidi Gardner⁵
2020 — Kansas City essential workers, during the pandemic ceremony¹
2025 — members of the Kansas City Current²

⚠ Claim removed. An earlier draft asserted that Walt Disney threw the ceremonial switch during a Kansas City return visit. No source located supports this and it is not repeated here.

Scale

Measure	Figure	Source
Strand length	~80 miles	KMBC, 2020 ceremony¹
Blocks illuminated	15	KSHB, Visit KC³²
Bulbs, 1940	~25,000	Kansas City Magazine⁵
Bulbs, 1962	75,000+	Kansas City Magazine⁵
Bulbs, 1970	100,000	Kansas City Magazine⁵
Bulbs, 2009	287,000	Kansas City Magazine⁵
Bulbs, 2025	”more than 200,000”	Kansas City Magazine⁵

The widely circulated tourism figure of 280,000 bulbs tracks the pre-LED peak rather than the current display; Kansas City Magazine’s 2025 count is “more than 200,000.”⁵

Installation and removal

The lights do not stay up year-round. A crew of four electricians from Capital Electric begins stringing them after Labor Day, using lift trucks for height and climbing ropes and shoes to reach the domes and towers. A full lights test runs the Wednesday before Thanksgiving from 2 to 6 a.m. Removal begins in mid-January and all lights are down by March, when they are checked, coiled, tied, wrapped, and catalogued for storage.² KCTV5 summarizes the cycle as three months to install and three months to remove.⁷ Tower lights are each a single color — the Time Tower at Broadway and Ward Parkway is always red.²

Conversion to LED

In 2014 the Plaza replaced its nearly 300,000 incandescent bulbs with LEDs.⁵⁷ The jewel-tone color palette and visual character were preserved across the conversion.

Continuity and its interruptions

The “unbroken since 1925” framing is popular locally but is not supported by the sourced record. Documented interruptions and stress tests:

The Great Depression. The first formal ceremony was held in the immediate wake of the October 1929 crash, and the display continued through the 1930s.⁵
World War II (1942-1945). “During World War II’s bleak years, while many Kansas Citians are fighting abroad, the Plaza remains dark.”⁵ ⚠ Visit KC’s own fact list contradicts this, stating that 1973 was the only year the lights were not in operation.² Both are recorded here; the conflict is unresolved.
1973 oil shock. President Nixon asked Americans to curtail Christmas lighting to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Kansas City Magazine records the lights being turned off three days after the Thanksgiving ceremony; Visit KC and The Star describe the display as not operating that year at all.⁵²⁸
The 1977 Plaza Flood (September 12, 1977). Sixteen inches of rain fell overnight, Brush Creek overtopped its banks, a ruptured gas main ignited fires along the 600 block of West 48th Street, and 77 of the Plaza’s 155 businesses were damaged. The Kansas City Public Library’s KCQ investigation puts the toll at 25 lives and more than $100 million in damage.⁹ ⚠ The National Weather Service gives 29 deaths for the same September 11-12, 1977 flash flood.¹⁰ Both figures are recorded. The ceremony went ahead: “by Thanksgiving, the lights were up and ready for the annual ceremony.”⁹³
The October 4, 1998 flash flood. Brush, Turkey, and Indian creeks flooded, killing eleven people in Kansas City and causing over $50 million in damage — the second-deadliest flash flood in the city’s history. The Country Club Plaza was not affected in 1998.¹⁰
The COVID-19 pandemic (2020). Police asked residents not to attend in person; the ceremony was held as a broadcast event with fireworks, with Kansas City essential workers throwing the switch. The lights themselves burned through the season.⁵¹

⚠ Claim removed. An earlier draft cited a “2017 Plaza Flash Flood” on Brush Creek. The major July 26-27, 2017 metro flooding centered on Indian and Tomahawk creeks, not Brush Creek at the Plaza, and no source located places a 2017 flood on the Plaza.

Long-term significance

Civic identity. The Plaza Lights are among the most-recognized seasonal symbols of Kansas City, and the Plaza’s own historians treat them as the district’s oldest continuous event.⁷
Attendance and civic scale. Reported crowds vary widely by year and by source: an estimated 100,000 in 1978, an estimated 250,000+ in 1998, and “several hundred thousand” by 2019.⁸⁵ KSHB described the 2017 crowd as “tens of thousands.”³ This page records the range rather than a single figure.
Continuity across owners. The Plaza passed from the J.C. Nichols Company to Highwoods Properties, then in 2016 to a Macerich/Taubman Centers partnership, and on July 1, 2024 to HP Village Management, whose president Ray W. Washburne pledged to be “the new stewards of this beloved destination.”¹¹ Every ownership transition has preserved the lighting tradition.
Architectural preservation. The lights’ integration with the Plaza’s original Spanish-Moorish detail gives an ongoing economic reason to preserve the rooflines, towers, and ornament that make the display visually distinctive.

The Country Club Plaza’s contested history

The Plaza Lights are inseparable from the Country Club Plaza and from J.C. Nichols’s broader Country Club District. Nichols was a national pioneer of racially restrictive real estate covenants — deed restrictions barring sale or rental to non-white buyers. As KCUR put it, Nichols “instituted housing policies that helped create Kansas City’s stark racial divides that persist to this day,” barring African Americans, Jews, and other racial and ethnic minorities from his subdivisions.¹² Worley’s biography is the standard scholarly treatment of the District’s development.¹³

On June 30, 2020, the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners voted unanimously to remove Nichols’s name from the fountain and the adjacent parkway, returning the parkway to its original name, Mill Creek Parkway.¹² Kansas City Parks and Recreation now lists the fountain simply as the Fountain in Mill Creek Park (Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd and Mill Creek Pkwy; sculptor Henri-Léon Gréber).¹⁴

Restrictive covenants were ruled federally unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), but their geographic effects on Kansas City’s segregation patterns remain measurable.

The lighting tradition predates the covenant controversies in its modern form and is generally treated separately in civic discourse — but a complete history of the Plaza must hold both threads.

Sites in KC associated with the tradition

Country Club Plaza — the whole 15-block district, illuminated each season³
Mill Creek Building — site of the original 1925 strand⁴
Mill Creek Park and the Fountain in Mill Creek Park — adjacent to the Plaza, at Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd and Mill Creek Pkwy¹⁴
The Time Tower, Broadway and Ward Parkway — lit a single color (red) each year²
47th Street — the 1928 expansion route, tied to the Plaza Theater opening⁵

Cultural memory

The ceremony is among the most-broadcast and most-photographed annual civic events in Kansas City; it has been a full-scale televised production since 1968 and airs live on KMBC.⁵² Kansas City Star reporter Lewis Diuguid captured its function in 1981: “It was their great escape. Gone was talk about soaring unemployment, high interest rates and hard times. No one spoke of the Hyatt Regency hotel disaster that took 113 lives and injured about 200 others just four months ago.”⁵

The century framing — one man, one ladder, and a strand of 16 bulbs in 1925 — is itself a load-bearing part of Kansas City’s civic self-understanding.⁸

Sources

KMBC 9 News — “With help from Kansas City’s essential workers, the Plaza Lights are shining bright” (updated 2020-12-01) — asserts: the 2020 ceremony was the 91st Plaza Lighting Ceremony and featured 80 miles of multi-colored lights illuminating the Country Club Plaza, with Kansas City essential workers helping turn them on. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Visit KC — “Kansas City Plaza Lights 2025.” — asserts: 96th Annual Evergy Plaza Lighting Ceremony, 6-8:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025, broadcast live on KMBC 7-7:50 p.m., switch flipped 7:55 p.m. by KC Current team members followed by fireworks; lights viewable Nov. 27, 2025 through Jan. 11, 2026; tradition started with a single strand over a store entrance in 1925 and the first Plaza Lighting Ceremony took place in 1930; a crew of four Capital Electric electricians begins stringing lights after Labor Day, uses lift trucks and climbing ropes for domes and towers, and removes everything by March for cataloguing and storage; lights test the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2-6 a.m.; the stage switch really does turn on all the lights and the assisting child is chosen at random; tower lights are one color each, the Time Tower at Broadway and Ward Parkway always red; “the only time that the Plaza Lights were not in operation occurred in 1973” when Nixon asked Americans to curtail Christmas lights. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵
KSHB 41 Action News — “A look back at the history of the KCP&L Plaza Lighting” (2017, 88th annual ceremony) — asserts: tradition began 1925 with a single strand of colored bulbs over the Mill Creek Building entrance on 47th Street; first formal ceremony 1930; 2017 was the 88th annual ceremony and drew tens of thousands; fifteen blocks of lights run daily 5 p.m. to 3 a.m.; the 1977 ceremony went ahead months after the deadly flood as a symbol of rebuilding; Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith and linebacker Derrick Johnson helped flip the 2017 switch, with Gary Lezak emceeing. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections — “This Week in Kansas City History: Let There Be Lights” (2024-12) — asserts: on December 25, 1925 a string of Christmas lights hung over the doorway of the Mill Creek Building at the Country Club Plaza for the first time; Plaza conceived by J.C. Nichols in 1912 when Brush Creek Valley was marsh with a nearby hog farm; Nichols bet on automobiles over electric streetcars; architects Edward Buehler Delk and George E. Kessler planned wide streets and extensive parking; site five miles south of downtown; plans announced 1922 and derided as “Nichols’ folly.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Kansas City Magazine — Ryan Reed, “More than 200,000 jewel-colored bulbs will blanket the Country Club Plaza this holiday season—but how did it begin?” (2025-11-26) — asserts: 1925, two years after the Plaza opens, J.C. Nichols Company maintenance supervisor Charles Pitrat hangs the first string of lights on the Mill Creek Building; 1928 Pitrat marks the Plaza Theater opening by stringing lights across 47th Street and several storefronts; 1929 first formal Plaza Lighting Ceremony held that Thanksgiving, iconic building-outline pattern established on roughly five buildings; 1940 ~25,000 bulbs; 1942-1945 the Plaza remains dark during World War II; 1962 total surpasses 75,000; 1968 ceremony becomes a full-scale televised production shown live Thanksgiving night; 1970 reaches 100,000; 1973 display curtailed in the oil shock, lights turned off three days after the Thanksgiving ceremony; 1977 Brush Creek flood damages 77 of 155 Plaza businesses, ceremony goes on; 1981 Lewis Diuguid Kansas City Star quote re: Hyatt Regency disaster (113 lives); 1998 Paul Rudd throws the switch before an estimated 250,000+; 2009 287,000 lights; 2014 nearly 300,000 incandescent bulbs replaced with LED; 2019 Heidi Gardner throws the switch, event regularly draws several hundred thousand; 2020 police discourage attendance during COVID-19, fireworks still held. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶
KCTV5 — “This Day in History: Switch flips at first Plaza Lighting Ceremony” (2025-11-27) — asserts: the first lighting ceremony at the Country Club Plaza was held on November 27, 1930, five years after a lone string of bulbs was lit for the holidays. ↩ ↩²
KCTV5 — “‘Nothing like it’: Plaza lights ceremony returns for century-old Kansas City holiday tradition” (2025-11-24, updated 2025-11-26) — asserts: first decoration in 1925 by Charles Pitrat, a maintenance supervisor for the Nichols Company; official ceremony established 1930; LED conversion completed in 2014 replacing incandescent bulbs; miles of lights across fifteen blocks and hundreds of thousands of bulbs on domes, towers, and windows; three months to install and three months to remove; 2025 ceremony Thanksgiving evening from 6:30 p.m. with the switch flipped at 7:55 p.m. by Kansas City Current members; lights on through January 11, 2026; “the oldest continuous event in the Plaza, followed by the Plaza Bunnies in 1931.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
The Kansas City Star — “The Plaza lights are a 100-year-old KC tradition. See ceremony through the years” (2025, syndicated) — asserts: the ceremony began with one man, a ladder, and a modest string of 16 lights strung across the doorway of one building on Christmas Day in 1925; the 96th annual ceremony was set for 6-8:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025; in 1930 the Plaza hosted its first lighting ceremony and has continued every Thanksgiving since except 1973, when Nixon asked for lights to be discontinued to reduce dependence on foreign oil; in 2020 the event was broadcast-only due to the pandemic; 1978 switch thrown by Angela O’Brien of Independence with anchorman Scott Feldman and Royals pitcher Paul Splittorff before an estimated 100,000; 1979 carriage rides introduced by Mary and Cherrie Green. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Kansas City Public Library / “What’s Your KCQ?” (with The Kansas City Star) — “The Plaza Flood – KCQ Investigates a 1977 Disaster” (2021-11) — asserts: heavy rain began around midnight on September 12, 1977 and a second wave hit that evening; sixteen inches of rain fell; Brush Creek overflowed despite a flash flood warning; a damaged gas main ignited, starting fires along the 600 block of W. 48th Street; 77 of the 155 Plaza businesses were damaged; the disaster claimed 25 lives and caused over $100 million in damages, the worst flood in Kansas City since 1951; by Thanksgiving the lights were up and ready for the annual ceremony, and most damaged businesses reopened within an 80-day recovery project; more than 300 families downstream remained in temporary housing by December. ↩ ↩²
NOAA National Weather Service, Kansas City/Pleasant Hill — “The Flash Flood of October 4, 1998.” — asserts: the October 4, 1998 flash flood struck Brush, Turkey, and Indian creeks, killed eleven people in Kansas City (ten after sunset and in automobiles) plus one in St. Joseph, and caused over $50 million in damage; it was the second-deadliest flash flood in Kansas City history, “eclipsed only by the September 11-12, 1977 flash flood that killed 29 people”; the Country Club Plaza was not affected in 1998. ⚠ The 29-death figure conflicts with the Kansas City Public Library’s 25. ↩ ↩²
KSHB 41 — “It’s official: Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza under new ownership” (2024-07-01) — asserts: HP Village Management finalized its purchase of the Country Club Plaza on Monday, July 1, 2024; the Plaza had been owned by a Macerich/Taubman Centers partnership since 2016; terms were not immediately disclosed; HP Village president Ray W. Washburne called the firm “the new stewards of this beloved destination”; Stephen Summers tapped to lead leasing. ↩
KCUR 89.3 — “Kansas City, Missouri, Parks Board Votes To Remove J.C. Nichols’ Name From Iconic Fountain And Parkway” (2020-06-30) — asserts: the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners voted unanimously on June 30, 2020 to remove J.C. Nichols’s name from the fountain and the parkway, restoring the parkway’s original name Mill Creek Parkway; Nichols instituted housing policies barring African Americans, Jews, and other racial and ethnic minorities from his subdivisions, which historians blame for racial divides that persist in Kansas City today. ↩ ↩²
William S. Worley — J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), xxv + 324 pp. ISBN 0-8262-0744-8 (cloth) / 978-0-8262-0926-9 (paper). Internet Archive (borrowable) — asserts: the standard scholarly treatment of J.C. Nichols, the Country Club District, the Plaza’s development, and the restrictive-covenant and homes-association machinery Nichols exported nationally. Offline pointer for claims about Nichols firm architects and District development history not covered by the news sources on this page. ↩
Kansas City Parks and Recreation — “Fountain in Mill Creek Park.” — asserts: the fountain’s current official name is “Fountain in Mill Creek Park,” located at Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd and Mill Creek Pkwy within Mill Creek Park; artist/designer Henri-Léon Gréber; hours 5 a.m. to midnight daily. ↩ ↩²