Christmas is coming, and it is time to look at the ghost of Christmas pass.
Lights in the Heights is about the lights until you stop walking. Then it is about the music.
By Jim Towers, M.J.A., J.D.
Most people come to Lights in the Heights for the houses. Stand still on the right block long enough, though, and you figure out the real show is on the porches and in the driveways.
On a December night inin front of a yellow Craftsman bungalow, a Scottish piper in full Highland dress filled the street with sound. The bungalow was outlined end to end in white bulbs, its porch columns wrapped like candy canes. On a plywood stage laid over the driveway, children in velvet vests and tartan skirts danced to his pipes, arms raised overhead, feet barely touching the boards. Later in the set a boy in a kilt danced alone over two swords crossed on the planks.
can you see the leg lamp in the window on the second floor.
They are not Scottish.
According to the piper’s sister, who is also the dancers’ aunt, the family’s tie to Scotland runs through the oil industry. He was transferred to Scotland for work, and the family lived there for seven years. The children came home with the Highland dances they had learned. He came home with the bagpipes.
So on a Houston street under the live oaks, a family that picked up its music on the other side of the Atlantic played it back for its neighbors. In an upstairs window behind them, a lit leg lamp glowed. It was that kind of night.
The pipers were not alone. Down the street, a student band played under a big oak: flutes, saxophones, trombones, a tuba, a drum kit and a couple of blue-and-white sombreros mixed in with the winter hats. Their director stood in the grass in front of them and kept time with both hands while families stopped on the sidewalk to listen.
At a white, columned house hung with gold garland and iron balconies, a band set up on the front porch. A guitarist in a black cowboy hat played to whoever stopped at the iron fence. A few doors away, a homemade cardboard sign reading “Private Party” hung on a gate while disco lights spun across a porch ceiling. That is how the night works. The porches belong to the neighbors. The sidewalks belong to everyone.
Around the corner, a group of teenagers in Santa hats, reindeer antlers and ugly sweaters sang carols from black folders in front of a fence hung with curtains of white lights. One wore a necklace of oversized blinking bulbs. Another wore a cotton-ball Santa beard. On the porch behind them, a few adults with drinks in hand had gone quiet to listen. Several of the young singers and musicians had masks pulled down under their chins, a reminder of what year it was.
Where it came from
Lights in the Heights began in the late 1980s as a neighborly Christmas gathering in the Woodland Heights: lights, music and cookies. It grew from there into one of the city’s best-known holiday traditions. The Woodland Heights Civic Association and its volunteers still run it. It is held on the second Saturday of December, when a few featured streets close to cars for the evening. Last year those were Bayland and Woodland, from Studewood to Beauchamp, from 6 to 9 p.m.
if you know you know.
This year’s event is expected on SATURDAY, DEC. 12, 2026 The featured streets change every year, so check the civic association’s site before you go. Many homes along the route host private parties. If there is a sign in the yard, enjoy it from the sidewalk.
The lights are what bring people to the Woodland Heights. The porches are why they stay.
Photos and video by Jim Towers / Houston Heights Independent.
Houston Heights Independent covered this story on the ground. HHI is a civic journalism publication operating on the Murrow standard.
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