Festive lights in Minsk: Christmas tree, installations and shining central streets

In the run-up to the beloved holiday season, Minsk turned on Christmas lights on 10 December. Minsk’s Christmas lights have been strung up around the city, and are cheerfully illuminating the cold winter nights. This year the city switched on the illumination earlier (usually it was 15 December) to get into the holiday spirit faster.

Traditionally, the festive marathon began with the national 30m-high New Year tree on Oktyabrskaya Square, and continued with 27 more elegant green beauties throughout the city. The New Year's tree near the Palace of Sports is 18 meters high: the designer New Year tree has a sparkling tent of sorts, under which people can walk and take unusual photos. The New Year tree on Independence Square differs in shape from other artificial trees. It looks like a real tree brought from Belovezhskaya Pushcha and clad in a golden outfit. The New Year tree near the Belarusian State Circus has Soviet style decorations and features characters from Soviet fairy tales and cartoons.

One of the must-visit places in Minsk in the run-up to New Year is Oktyabrskaya Square that hosts the national New Year tree. This season, the tree decorations are made mostly in red, green, blue, gold, silver and snow-white. The color palette is diluted with shades of turquoise, blue and purple. The tree is wrapped in a special canvas of more than 20,000 pixels and has 3.2 km long garlands! The decorations were complemented by matte and glossy baubles, carved milled stars, snowflakes, cornflowers, angels and ice crystals. The New Year tree is surrounded by colorful wooden cottages housing souvenir and food vendors.

The Our Children charity campaign will kick off on 15 December. Children will be invited to see fantastic fairytale New Year's Time Machine at the Palace of the Republic starting from 23 December. Children visiting the show will get gifts from Grandfather Frost. On 16-24 December, the venue near the Palace of Sports will be hosting the New Year Trees of Our City exhibition, a display of the Christmas season symbols from enterprises and districts of the Belarusian capital.