Leavenworth switched off the countdown and Christmas stayed lit until February

Some towns have a Christmas you understand on one date: the night of the 24th, the afternoon of Epiphany, the first Saturday of Advent. For decades Leavenworth had a Christmas like that, with an exact time, and it gave it up on purpose. Since 2021 the lights of this town of 2,300 people on the eastern slope of the Cascades are not switched on in front of anyone: they are simply on, every night from Thanksgiving to the last day of February. That changes the question of when to go. It is no longer about arriving in time for a lighting, but about choosing at which point in three months the two things the town promises, light and snow, coincide best. And they do not coincide when almost everyone assumes.

The Christmas Lighting Festival began as a single December weekend, when two of the promoters of the town's Bavarian makeover, Ted Price and Bob Rodgers, decorated their restaurant, the Squirrel Tree, and the town followed suit. That story, of a ruined timber town that in the 1960s dressed up as an Alpine village to survive, is told by FlowTravel in Destinations; what matters here is what the festival did to the calendar. Over the years the one weekend became three, the first three of December, and each ended the same way: as dusk fell, at around 4:45 pm, a collective countdown switched on the lights of Front Street and the park all at once. The official 2018 programme still announced «the countdown at 4:45 pm on Saturdays and Sundays».

The problem was arithmetic. A five-minute ceremony packed tens of thousands of people onto one open space after they had all arrived on a single two-lane road. The state transport department counted 5,900 vehicles in ten hours on the first weekend of December 2020, and that with the festival already cancelled. Front Street shopkeepers spoke of an atmosphere «that left a sour taste»; the Chamber of Commerce, of parking, safety and traffic. A town that had invented a festival to draw people now had too many of them, all at the same hour.

The pandemic supplied the excuse. In August 2020 the Chamber cancelled the lighting ceremonies and announced that the installation, more than half a million lights, would come on anyway, on a timer at 4:45 each afternoon, from Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day, with a webcam for watching from home. In May 2021 the decision became permanent: the weekend «flipping of the switch» was dropped, the lights would be on every day, the programme at the bandstand and the Festhalle would be spread across the week, and the December festival was renamed Christmastown, inside a larger umbrella, the Village of Lights, that lasts the whole winter. In December 2021 the Wenatchee newspaper put it exactly: Leavenworth leaves the Christmas lights on and says goodbye to the countdown.

What was lost was a rite, and locals say so plainly: «it was really, really cool and I wish we could do it, however, I do understand that it was becoming problematic», as the owner of three Front Street shops put it. What was gained was time. Today the official calendar divides the winter into three named months: December is Christmastown, January is Winter Karneval and February is Love from Leavenworth, and the lights, the same ones, stay on from six in the morning to eleven at night through all three. A town that sold an instant now sells a whole season. For anyone deciding when to go, that is the news: the moment is no longer set by the town; you set it.

The hour of that countdown was no accident. At 47.6 degrees north and at the western edge of its time zone, Leavenworth has its earliest sunset of the year around 10 December, at 4:11 pm, and at the solstice the sun sets at 4:13 pm after a day of eight hours and twenty-five minutes. Quarter to five was simply the first moment at which darkness made the lighting visible. By late January the sun sets a little after five, and by late February around a quarter to six: still before dinner.

That early darkness is what turns an illuminated town into a season rather than a night show. Between December and February the «night of lights» begins while people are still out on the street, lasts six or seven hours and fits into any working day: you can arrive on a Tuesday at five, walk the three blocks of Front Street with the lights already on and have dinner at seven feeling you have seen the whole of Christmas. In the old model that experience was rationed to six Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In the new one the town has spread it over some ninety nights, and most of them are empty.

A town that sold a five-minute instant now sells ninety nights. The light is the same; what changes from month to month is what lies underneath it.

What lies underneath, ideally, is snow, and here it pays to look closely at the numbers, because the town has a reputation for whiteness that is only partly earned. The 1991–2020 climate normals for the Leavenworth 3 S cooperative station (NOAA, at 344 metres, on the edge of town) give December an average high of 0.9 °C, a low of −6.7 °C and 82 centimetres of snowfall; January 0.8 °C, −7.0 °C and 56 centimetres; February 5.8 °C, −6.1 °C and 32 centimetres. About two metres fall in a year. December is by far the snowiest month. But snowing and having snow on the ground are different things, and the difference lies in altitude.

Downtown Leavenworth sits at 356 metres, very low for the Cascades; the mountains around it rise to between 1,500 and 2,400. The Chamber of Commerce itself says so in its snow guide: in a mild, wet December the precipitation reaches town as rain while the surrounding slopes load up with snow, and downtown is «the least reliable» place to find it on the ground. The National Weather Service climatology for Spokane gives Leavenworth an 80 % chance of at least an inch of snow on the ground on 25 December and a 30 % chance of snowfall that day; in Plain, the neighbouring valley 200 metres higher, the first figure rises to 90 %; in Wenatchee, some 35 kilometres downriver, it drops to 42 %. Four Christmases in five are white. The fifth rains, and it tends to be the one that fell in the first week of December, when the town is full.

The snow that stays comes later. The climate table the Chamber publishes for people thinking of moving to town puts the average snow depth on the ground at its maximum, around 50 centimetres, in January and February, not December. The snow guide says the same in other words: December and January are the months most likely to have snow for the whole of a stay, and by February «the snowpack is usually well established». In other words, the month with the most programme and the most people is the one with the most doubtful snow at street level; the two months that follow, with the same lights, have an almost guaranteed white ground. The town's equation, light plus snow, is not solved on the first Saturday of December. It is solved in January.

The Chamber of Commerce does not hide it. Its own guide describes December as the month of «full holiday magic and the biggest crowds», and January as lights on snow «with more breathing room». The January programme, Winter Karneval, is built around weekends: fire dancers at the park bandstand on the second weekend, ice sculptors working in Front Street Park and fireworks over downtown on the Sunday of the Martin Luther King long weekend in mid-month. On weekdays there is no programme, and that is the best thing about it: a town of half a million lights, with half a metre of snow in the gardens and freshly shovelled pavements, for the few who have understood that Christmas was not switched off on the 24th.

February extends the window at a different temperature. The average high rises five degrees on January, so afternoons can be spent outdoors without fighting the cold, while nights stay below freezing and keep the snow. The programme thins to a wine-and-chocolate weekend around Valentine's Day, and the lights go off on the last day of the month. It is the stretch in which Leavenworth looks least like a theme park and most like a mountain town in winter, which is, after all, what the lights are trying to evoke.

Almost everyone arrives from Seattle on US-2, and that road is as much a part of the season as the lights. It crosses the Cascades at Stevens Pass, 1,238 metres, some 60 kilometres from town, where a ski area occupies the summit itself and the road can be seen from the chairlifts curling between two walls of snow-laden firs. Then it drops through Tumwater Canyon, fifteen kilometres of narrow gorge in which the two-lane road and the Wenatchee River compete for the floor between granite walls. The state transport department calls it, without ornament, «avalanche alley»: the chutes are so steep and so numerous that preventive control is nearly impossible, and when the risk rises the road is closed between Coles Corner and the Icicle Road turn-off, at the gates of town.

Seen from the passenger seat, that drive is the best explanation of the town's climate. West of the pass everything drips: this is the wet side, the one that takes the Pacific. At the summit it truly snows; the Chamber recommends Stevens Pass as «the more dependable bet» for finding snow early in the season. And coming out of the canyon, suddenly, the sky opens, the firs give way to ponderosa pines and the air dries out: Leavenworth sits in the rain shadow of the mountains you have just crossed. That is why it snows less in town than it seems and the sun shines more than you expect of a northwestern winter. The snow in the Front Street postcards comes from above; the snow on the ground comes from it being cold enough not to melt. And that sustained cold arrives in January.

December charges you in people and in uncertainty. It is the only month with the full programme, Santa, the carollers and the Festhalle evenings, and in return it brings the crowds the town tried to undo, now concentrated on the weekends rather than in an hour. Snow at street level is the most doubtful of the season. The US-2 queues on those weekends, and how to sidestep them, FlowTravel covers separately in Worth Knowing; here it is enough to say that they exist and that they belong to December.

January charges you in cold and in programme. The average low sits at −7 °C, there are weeks when the Tumwater stretch closes for avalanches and, Monday to Thursday, the town offers nothing but itself, lit and snowed in. February charges you in atmosphere: fewer decorated windows, Winter Karneval already gone, a town beginning to think about spring even though the lights stay up until the 28th. November charges the opposite: newly lit lights over a still-brown valley, because November snow, when it falls, almost never lasts.

If you can choose only one week, choose the second or third of January, arriving midweek. You get the same lights as December, the deepest snow of the year on the ground, a weekend with fire dancers or fireworks if you want one and, on the other days, a lit town that switches itself off at eleven at night without anyone having counted down. If what you want is Christmas with its full name, the Festhalle, Santa, the carollers, the first half of December has all of it, and charges you the crowds and the snow lottery in return. And if you arrive in November, you will see the purest lighting of all, the one that happens without ceremony on Thanksgiving Day, over a valley that is not yet white.

Leavenworth invented a Christmas with a time slot to draw people, and the time slot worked so well it got in the way. By removing it, the town discovered something the mountains had always known: light can be scheduled; snow cannot. And the snow comes in January.

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