The mistake people make with Utah Valley lights is geographic, not seasonal. The displays run from Saratoga Springs down to Payson, which is most of the length of the county, and an evening that starts with the Lehi walk-through and ends at the Spanish Fork drive-through is an evening spent mainly on I-15. This tool takes the fifteen organized displays from our Christmas lights map, sorts them around wherever you are leaving from, and stops adding stops when the clock runs out.
Counts time at each stop plus the drive between them. It does not count the queue at a ticketed gate, which on a December weekend can be substantial.
Three of the fifteen charge admission and all three must be booked before you arrive. Twelve are simply switched on.
The drive-through filter is the one that matters with a baby, or in weather. A walk-through is a mile of standing still in a valley that sits below freezing after dark.
The Lehi walk-through closes on Sundays. Everything else on the map is switched on and stays on.
Show the stops that did not fit
How the ordering works, and what it does not know
The route is greedy, and that is deliberate. It starts at the city you name, takes the nearest display that passes your filters, then takes the nearest one to that, and keeps going until the time budget is spent. This is not the mathematically shortest tour of every stop; it is the order a person actually drives, which is to say the next-closest thing that is still worth seeing. Where two stops sit almost on top of each other — Payson's two, or the pair in downtown Provo — the ordering picks them up together, because the drive between them is shorter than the time spent parking.
The clock is an estimate and the tool says so on every line. Drive times come from the straight-line distance between two pins, inflated to approximate the road network and divided by an average winter-evening speed on surface streets. Time at each stop comes from the kind of display it is: a drive-through is a fixed-length car route, a walk-through is a distance on foot plus the standing about, and a shopping center is however long you decide, because you are already parked. None of these are operator statements. Treat every figure as the middle of a wide range and leave yourself a margin.
What this tool will never print is a date, a price, an opening hour or a radio frequency. The lights map holds that line for a reason: every one of those numbers moves annually, several operators publish next season's only a few weeks ahead, and this site deploys in batches, so a confident wrong number would stand for weeks with nothing to catch it. What is durable — where a display is, who runs it, whether you walk or drive, whether it is ticketed, whether Sunday is an option — is what you get here. Everything seasonal routes to the operator, whose page will be current when you read it.
The county divides into three natural runs, and the planner will tend to keep you inside one of them: south pairs the Spanish Fork drive-through with Salem and Payson, central runs downtown Provo with Riverwoods and University Place, and north pairs Lehi with the American Fork drive-through. Combining north and south in a single evening means driving the length of the county twice, and if you ask for a short budget from an end-of-valley city, the planner will simply give you fewer stops rather than pretend that drive is free.
For the full map, the source behind every row and the reasoning on what is worth booking, read the Christmas lights guide. For the Provo-only calendar of concerts, markets and Santa visits, that is Christmas in Provo. If you are choosing a tree first, we keep a separate guide to the cut-your-own farms and permits.
Displays are re-verified against their operators when the lights map is updated. If something here has moved or gone dark, tell us and we will pull it.