The trees are up, the lights are lit and the holiday season will officially get underway this weekend in San Diego with the annual December Nights holiday festival at Balboa Park. But if you're not feeling the holiday cheer just yet, there are also a number of non-holiday themed events happening across the region.
December Nights
This Friday and Saturday brings the 42nd annual Balboa Park December Nights, a free holiday festival. But remember parking can be a challenge so plan ahead. The festival features light displays, choirs, dancers and food. December nights runs Friday from 3 to 11 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 11 p.m.
Little Fish Comic Savvy Holiday
If you want something to do Friday night KPBS arts reporter Beth Accomando suggests attending Little Fish’s Comic Savvy Holiday Edition. Friday the studio is hosting its Comic Savvy Holiday Edition from 7 to 10 p.m. The event is free and open the public.
Little Fish Comic Book Studio opened in 2012 as a nonprofit comic art studio and advocacy group, which its Executive Director Alonso Nunez explained simply means "we teach classes, we run camps and all the kinds of cool, fun art studio stuff that you would expect. But then we do a lot of advocacy for comic books in general so we run community events, we have different partnerships around the city to involve the community, to involve schools, to kind of to convince everyone that comics are a legitimate art form and that they can be educational and that they can be fun and that they are a true American art form."
The studio also serves as a community hub and opens its doors on a regular basis for a Comic Savvy.
"So a comic savvy is a chance for students, teachers, professionals but also just lay people that love comic books to come into the studio," Nunez said. "I often feel bad because parents or younger siblings or even older siblings will come in for a family member's class just to drop them off or to see the studio and they look around and they go, 'It's amazing.' But we realized early on there was a desire for a Little Fish to be a community hub. And so every month or so we open up the doors, we buy donuts, we have free comic books. And beyond that, it's a chance for people to come in see the space, talk shop whether they be professionals, fans, students and just get to get to see the space to explore it. We have people that come in and all they wanna do is just sit and read from our library for three hours."
'Danny's Story'
If you want to look past the weekend, Blindspot Collective’s production 'Danny’s Story' was inspired by San Diego LGBTQ youth and will be performed this month at high schools around San Diego and on Dec. 11 at Lyceum Theatre. 'Danny's Story' is about a transgender high school student who decides to pursue their gender identity.
