The Dallas Arboretum's glowing gazebo village is taking its final bow. The Twelve Days of Christmas exhibit — twelve towering, glass-enclosed structures built to look like giant Victorian music boxes — will return for one more holiday season this winter before the garden retires it for good. The display reopens November 11 and stays lit through January 3, 2027, closing out a run that has defined the Arboretum's holidays for the past 12 years.
The closure was confirmed to Bloom Magazine and reported by The Dallas Morning News, whose report notes that this 2026 season will be the last chance for visitors to experience the iconic holiday display. The tradition dates back to 2012, when Dallas philanthropists Phyllis and Tom McCasland proposed building a large-scale holiday experience inspired by the traditional English carol, according to the same report, which also credits the display with becoming one of the most-visited holiday attractions in North Texas over its run.
A 12-Year Tradition Rooted in a McCasland Gift
The exhibit itself debuted in 2014, after nearly two years of design, engineering and fabrication, according to StageD. The McCaslands' gift financed the roughly $2 million construction, turning a concept loosely built around the classic carol into a permanent fixture of the Arboretum's calendar.
Bringing the twelve gazebos to life fell to Dallas Opera production designer Tommy Bourgeois, who worked alongside Greg Blackburn and Dallas Stage Scenery, the newspaper's reporting shows. To keep the mannequins convincing under stage lighting and unpredictable Texas weather, Dallas Opera wig designer Dawn Rivard fitted every figure with real human hair wigs rather than synthetic ones, according to the Dallas Arboretum.
Twelve Illuminated Gazebos, Rebuilt by Firefighters Each Fall
Each of the twelve gazebos stands 25 feet tall, enclosed in glass and styled after Victorian architecture, with moving figures, animals and music engineered to operate like giant music boxes, as Private Newport has described the display. Visitors have long been able to see the twelve scenes by day or under their full nighttime lighting.
Dallas Fire-Rescue crews begin transporting and assembling the gazebos every August, a process that, per The Rose Table, takes roughly eight weeks of on-site setup before the exhibit can open each November. The department also builds the neighboring Neuhoff Family Christmas Village as part of the same seasonal build-out.
More Than Gazebos: A Christmas Village and a Historic Nativity Collection
Beyond the twelve scenes, the seasonal display expands into a European-inspired Christmas Village with more than 15 artisan storefronts and a 23-foot German Christmas Pyramid, or Drehturm, as Private Newport has reported.
Indoors, the Arboretum's historic, 21,000-square-foot DeGolyer House hosts holiday art displays during the season, including a collection of more than 300 international Nativity creches and hundreds of nutcrackers, according to Candy's Dirt.
HYBYCOZO's Geometric Light Sculptures Arrive in 2027
Replacing the gazebos in 2027 will be a new exhibition from HYBYCOZO, a studio that creates large-scale, laser-cut geometric light sculptures inspired by natural forms and mathematics, according to the Desert Botanical Garden. Founded in 2014 by artists Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu, the studio took its name from Douglas Adams's science-fiction novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.'
The coming installation, titled the Art of HYBYCOZO, was created specifically for the Dallas Arboretum and will present a luminous outdoor exhibition of larger-than-life geometric sculptures, according to Dallas News.
A Garden Built to Anchor Every Season
The Dallas Arboretum sits on 66 acres along the shore of White Rock Lake in East Dallas, drawing roughly 1 million visitors a year since opening in 1984 on the historic DeGolyer estate, according to the Dallas Arboretum. Holiday at the Arboretum is one of three anchor festivals the garden stages each year, alongside the Dallas Blooms flower festival in spring, which features up to 500,000 blooms, and Autumn at the Arboretum, which brings in more than 100,000 pumpkins each fall.
The garden's role extends beyond seasonal spectacle, too. This past spring, the Arboretum served as a key venue for Dallas ISD's Learning Voyages pilot program, hosting STEM field trips for more than 48,000 public school students across multiple grade levels.
