DULUTH — With Bentleyville lit and the 2025 Christmas City of the North Parade only a memory, the holiday season is here. Check out our guide to related events, and read on for some additional ideas.
Only in America would the week following Thanksgiving turn into a secular holy week full of prompts to drop your cash: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. Still, the prompts work — and Small Business Saturday is “the Super Bowl for independently owned businesses,” as The Bookstore at Fitger’s put it in a recent newsletter.
In Duluth, which prides itself on craft and entrepreneurship, you can’t throw an agate without hitting a small business (so please don’t). Whatever your favorite spots in the city are, there’s a good chance they will be offering specials or other enticements to spend locally. Small Business Saturday special events are too numerous to list here: just check your local businesses’ social media accounts.
That said, it’s worth sparing a thought for Duluth’s craft breweries and cideries, which are reeling from the recent federal legislation set to eliminate their ability to sell THC beverages.
and
are all hosting holiday markets Saturday, Nov. 29.
Christmas at the Lighthouse
You knew that Glensheen gets decked out for Christmas — did you know there’s also special holiday programming at Split Rock Lighthouse? From Friday, Nov. 28, through Sunday, Dec. 28, the Minnesota Historical Society site offers opportunities to experience Christmas as keepers did in the 1930s.
“Christmas at the Lighthouse” is a guided experience in a restored keeper’s house, with participants invited to make vintage-style ornaments they can either keep or leave on a tree or other visitors to enjoy
Contributed / Aidan Thibault
Is Aidan Thibault the funniest person in the Twin Cities? He was, as of 2024, according to the judges of Acme Comedy Company’s annual Funniest Person Contest. The win was a coup for the 2023 Duluth East High School graduate, who was hailed by
as a “teenage wunderkind” after besting over 100 other comics in the much-watched contest.
On Friday, Nov. 28, Thibault is bringing his act back home and headlining a show at Wussow’s. It may be your chance at bragging rights: previous Funniest Person Contest winners include Mary Mack and Nick Swardson, among other comics who went on to national fame. According to Thibault, “the (Duluth) show has been selling pretty fast”
Contributed / Nelson French
For years, the band Trailer Trash’s “Trashy Little Christmas” show was a December must at Lee’s Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis. Lee’s closed in 2019
(the building is currently for sale
if you want to bring it back), but Trailer Trash is still going strong. In fact, the band is going all the way to Silver Bay.
On Friday, Nov. 28, Trailer Trash will bring its holiday show to the Silver Bay Reunion Hall — and admission is free. The following night, Saturday, Nov. 29, the band will play a Silver Bay house show as a fundraiser supporting live music in the city.
Trailer Trash even has a new song that’s inspired, according to the event description, “by Rudolph’s all-too-familiar struggle of being left out in the cold.” Can anyone on the North Shore relate?
Contributed / Mint Talent Group
Geriatric millennials remember Mason Jennings as the swoonworthy singer-songwriter whose namesake band won City Pages’ Picked to Click honor in 1999.
In the quarter-century since, Jennings has been on a musical journey that has included signing with Isaac Brock’s record label; forming a band with Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam); and covering Bob Dylan for “I’m Not There,” the closest thing to a Dylan biopic that existed prior to
There’s a reason he has a star on the wall of First Avenue.
Suffice to say, Jennings will have a lot of history to draw on Saturday, Nov. 29, when he returns to Sacred Heart Music Center. Skarlett Woods opens
‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’
News Tribune archive / Newspapers.com
When “The Muppet Christmas Carol” was released in 1992, it opened at Hermantown’s Cinema 8 and Superior’s Mariner 4. The News Tribune published a capsule review by Roger Ebert, who gave the movie three out of four stars and called it “fun, perhaps, for older children, who will understand why so much of a holiday movie seems to take place in graveyards.”
The movie must have made quite an impression on those children, because today it stands as a holiday staple and, for many, the best cinematic telling of Charles Dickens’ classic tale. The Cinema 8 closed in 2004, and the Mariner 4 (later known as the Superior Value Cinema) ceased operations in 2015 — but you can still see “Muppet Christmas Carol” on the big screen, thanks to the Zeitgeist Zinema.
Zeitgeist has four screenings of the movie planned this holiday season, with the first two happening on Saturday, Nov. 29, and Sunday, Nov. 30
Arts and entertainment reporter Jay Gabler joined the Duluth News Tribune in 2022. His previous experience includes eight years as a digital producer at The Current (Minnesota Public Radio), four years as theater critic at Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages, and six years as arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet. He’s a co-founder of pop culture and creative writing blog The Tangential; he’s also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Minnesota Film Critics Association. You can reach him at jgabler@duluthnews.com or 218-409-7529.