The Holidazzle will return to Nicollet Mall for five days this winter but without its hallmark parade, following a one-year hiatus due to a lack of funding.

The free, family-friendly festival will take place Dec. 18-22 on Nicollet Mall between Sixth and 11th streets, the Minneapolis Downtown Council announced early Thursday.

This year’s festivities include light and art installations, holiday shopping pop-ups, an indoor and an outdoor stage for live entertainment, free rollerskating and mini-golf, food trucks, fire pits, and visits with Santa. There’s also a new private event space called the Holidazzle Hospitality Hub, which can be rented for big holiday parties with as many as 1,000 people. Details on other activations are expected in the coming weeks.

The goal of the latest Holidazzle revival is to make the event "family-friendly and all-encompassing as possible," Downtown Council President and CEO Adam Duininck said in a Thursday interview with Downtown Voices.

The Downtown Council hopes to attract at least 50,000 people per night and pull from other events happening downtown including concerts, plays, and Timberwolves games.

Duininck said this year's Holidazzle piggybacks off of successful summer events held on Nicollet Mall, including Taste of Minnesota and Promenade du Nord, the Parisian street fair that took place during the Olympic gymnastics team trials. Those events also show what's possible year-round if buses are moved off of Nicollet Mall.

"Seeing Nicollet when it's really alive is galvanizing and something that really gets people excited," Duininck said.

The Holidazzle started in 1992 as an illuminated parade down Nicollet Mall, with the goal of drawing shoppers downtown and away from the then-new Mall of America. The parade was retired after 2013 because it got too expensive, then the Holidazzle was reformatted as a festival and moved to Loring Park, where it was held in recent years over several weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Attendance was estimated at 200,000 in 2022.

The Downtown Council, which manages and produces the event, decided to take a year off in 2023 because it didn’t have enough funding to "ensure the beloved holiday tradition will deliver the magical experience the community expects and deserves while keeping it free and accessible.”

Duininck’s predecessor, Steve Cramer, told Axios last year that it cost millions of dollars to put on the parade, compared to “high six figures” for the festival in Loring Park. "That's why the parade was retired 10 years ago,” he said.

But this year the Downtown Council hopes to bring back some magic of the beloved parade by projecting old footage onto a Nicollet Mall building.