While stores and bakeries insist on making the most wonderful time of the year begin earlier each year, selling decorations and holiday cookies for weeks already, others are now in preparation mode, getting ready turn on their Christmas lights. At the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Kallithea, they are to be switched on on December 1st, with a musical celebration planned to inaugurate their outdoor “Christmas World.”

Besides glimmering lights in the Stavros Niarchos Park and at the canal, with its popular ice rink in the center, three special light installations by foreign and Greek artists will also be presented. At 19:00 at the Agora, the youth orchestra and youth choir of El Sistema Greece community music project will join the popular band Onirama, to perform carols and international hits.

During the actual holidays, on December 23 through January 6, children are invited to “Christmas Stories at the Lighthouse” – an interactive musical performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snowman,” every day at 18:00.

On December 27, at 21:00, a Christmas concert featuring iconic musical pieces of imperial Vienna will be performed by the ERT National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of award-winning conductor George Petrou, at the Stavros Niarchos Hall.

You can find ticket information for “Christmas Stories at the Lighthouse” here, and for the musical pieces of imperial Vienna will be performed by the ERT concert here, and soon pre-register (for free) for ice skating here.

Finally, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the celebrations reach their peak with the annual SNF Run: 2022 First Run, organized each year for charity.