Menlo Park Saved Its Holiday Trees. Downtown's String Lights Are on Their Own.
Menlo Park will light two holiday trees in two parts of town this year, four days apart. Both went through a June budget review that could have left them dark. The string lights in the downtown street trees, which glow every night of the season, came out of the same review without a repair contract. When those bulbs burn out, nobody is paid to replace them.
These two outcomes came from the same council and the same budget. They show which parts of December the city chose to protect when it had to pick.
In early June, The Almanac reported that city staff faced a projected $2.8 million deficit in a $90.5 million budget for fiscal year 2026-27. Staff recommended another $700,000 in cuts. One of them was the annual winter tree lighting at Fremont Park, along with the holiday tree at the Belle Haven Community Campus. Ending both would have saved $70,000.
The council's June 9 discussion went differently. According to The Almanac's follow-up, the tree lighting was the only item on which the council departed from the staff recommendation. Councilmembers said they would rather keep the trees lit and end the celebration around them, because most of the event's cost was staff time. The staff-time figures show why the two events are different sizes.
| Event | Staff planning hours | Staff hours on event day |
|---|---|---|
| Fremont Park, downtown | About 250 | 87 |
| Belle Haven Community Campus | 40 to 50 | 60 |
The council asked staff to work out what the events actually cost, and whether ending or shrinking them could pay for lighting both trees. By June 23, when the council adopted the budget, the $70,000 tree-lighting cut was gone from the list. The reductions slide adds up to $906,355 in cuts, and none of them touches the holiday trees. The city announced the adopted budget on June 29.
The celebration the council was willing to drop is now on the city calendar anyway. It has a bigger job this year than it has had before.
The city's listing for Shop local! Light Up the Season calls the evening the kickoff of Menlo Park's Centennial Celebration. The program includes youth performances, centennial and winter-themed photo spots, hot cocoa while supplies last, and the tree lighting. It runs Friday, December 4, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Fremont Park, at Santa Cruz Avenue and University Drive, rain or shine. The event is traditionally held on the first Friday of December, so the date is the usual one.
According to the City Manager's Office, Menlo Park incorporated on November 23, 1927. That makes the coming year the city's hundredth. At a March 21 council workshop, city staff presented a plan to fold centennial activities into seven existing city events between December 2026 and November 2027. The plan ends with a separate centennial event in November 2027. Partners named in the presentation are the Menlo Park Historical Association, local businesses and community groups.
This means the centennial is not being run as a separate set of events. Its first occasion is the tree lighting that nearly lost its celebration six months earlier. The Menlo Park Historical Association has used its 2026 newsletters to ask members for ideas on marking the anniversary.
The city's event page also has a sponsorship guide and an interest form for local businesses that want to support the evening.
One change will be visible from Santa Cruz Avenue. The city says it will light "our beautiful Menlo Park oak tree as we give our beloved pine tree a well deserved break." The city's general page for the event already calls it "the lighting of the big oak tree."
The oak has local meaning for a centennial opener. The Menlo Park Historical Association's 2026 newsletter says the oak used as the model for the city's official logo once stood in Burgess Park, near the Little League field. The city's logo is drawn from an oak, and an oak will be lit to open its hundredth year.
The Belle Haven tree came through the same June review and gets its own evening first. Cocoa at the Campus is Monday, November 30, from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Belle Haven Community Campus, 100 Terminal Ave. The program has youth performances, hot cocoa, mini-churros and what the city calls a small tree lighting. Admission is free.
The staff-hour figures from June explain the smaller scale. The Belle Haven celebration takes a fraction of the planning hours the downtown event needs. Because the two evenings fall on a Monday and the following Friday, a household can go to both.
The Almanac reported that the council supported ending the $43,000 contract that maintains the decorative string lights on downtown trees, and that once those lights burn out, they will not be repaired. The adopted reductions list it as the "Downtown/Santa Cruz median and street tree lighting maintenance contract." The June report noted that the existing lights stay up. A contractor just stops repairing or replacing them when they fail.
These are two different kinds of holiday lighting. The tree lighting is one evening with a crowd, performers and a countdown, and it now carries the centennial. The string lights shine every evening along the corridor where downtown's restaurants and shops are, the same businesses the December 4 event asks people to visit. With no contract in place, each bulb that fails along Santa Cruz Avenue this season stays dark.
The cut sits among other trims in the same budget. Those include a 20 percent reduction in contracts for weeding and landscaping city medians, and fewer library and recreation programs. Seen alongside those cuts, the trees and the December 4 event look like a deliberate choice to keep them.
From November 5, these are the city dates that shape the next six weeks:
All of these are planned events, so check the city listings close to each date for any changes. Six more centennial occasions will follow December 4 over the next year, attached to events already on the city's calendar, before the centennial event in November 2027.
If you own a home or a business on or near Santa Cruz Avenue and want to think through how the centennial year, downtown upkeep and the holiday season fit into your plans, the team at Luxuriant Realty follows these local decisions closely and is glad to talk. Request a personalized consultation, and we will share what we are seeing downtown this season.
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