The city’s annual Royal Oak Holidays, designed to celebrate winter holidays and bring the community together, ran from November 21st to December 21st. Events were scheduled every weekend at various locations around the city, and combined with the city’s Winterblast event to
provide more opportunities for a wider audience, including families and young children.

Each weekend featured a different theme, with marshmallow roasting stations and visits with Santa offered each weekend. Royal Oak Holidays chairperson, Jon Witz, coordinated events with local businesses and made final decisions on how things ran.

Witz explained that organizing citywide events is a process months in the making.

“It’s a five month process [with] fundraising first. The production of the different elements and putting them together was really kind of crazy for the last 3 to 4 months,” he said.

The weekend themes included Grand Opening Weekend, Thrill Weekend, Shops + Sweets Weekend, Giving + Gliding Weekend, and Grinch + Games Weekend. Each weekend included 5-7 events, with at least one free event each weekend. To ensure everyone in the
community found an engaging activity, a variety of activities were planned.

Grand Opening Weekend kicked off the series of celebrations in downtown. The park outside of the Royal Oak Public Library was decorated with string lights and a pine tree, which was lit on Friday, November 21st. The weekend included carnival rides, visits with Santa, and
marshmallow roasting stations. The weekend also saw the reopening of the ice skating rink, which remained open until late February. The last event for opening weekend was the Launch of the Great Royal Oak Elf Hunt, where all players were required to sign up on Scavify —an app
that helped keep scavenger hunts and other group events organized— by November 23rd. The Elf Hunt included 40 different participating stores in Royal Oak, with elves hidden throughout the store. Each elf helped individuals accumulate points to win prizes that were later given out by
the city. The Elf Hunt lasted through each weekend of Royal Oak Holidays, providing ample opportunity for participants to win prizes.

Thrill Weekend ran from November 28th through 30th and included ziplining and a life- size Hungry Hippos game, both of which were free events. The Hungry Hippo game included three separate rounds: an adult round, a family round, and a student/teenager round. During the
student round, groups representing clubs and sports competed in the life-sized game, with the winning group receiving $1,000 to support their sport or club. Thrill Weekend also introduced Horse & Wagon rides, which continued during the weekends that followed.

The Shops + Sweets Weekend included holiday markets and holiday cabins with live music in Downtown Royal Oak. The event with the most traction in the Shops + Sweets weekend was the Cookie Crawl. Twenty-one stores participated, including Astoria Pastry Shop, Pitaya, and Seven Sundays Coffee. The Cookie Crawl required a $5 admission fee for all ages and included a tin in which to collect one cookie from each of the participating stores in Downtown Royal Oak.

The Giving + Gilding Weekend was a continuation of the Holiday Markets and featured free ice skating at the city’s ice rink for the whole weekend. This weekend also included a Broomball game between the Royal Oak Fire Department and the Royal Oak Police Department
to raise money for homeless organizations, with a goal of raising $10,000. The Bottomless Toy Chest Toy Drive collected toys for underprivileged kids during the holiday season. The final weekend of Royal Oak Holidays was the Grinch + Games Weekend, with visits from the Grinch and ice sculptures placed around Downtown Royal Oak. The event, organized by Witz, placed ice sculptures in front of Royal Oak businesses to serve as invitations for citizens to visit a business they had yet to try. Witz explained that the events chosen for Royal Oak Holidays were chosen to bring the community together in as many ways possible. With this in mind, city officials carefully curated Royal Oak Holidays, choosing a variety of events.

“Royal Oak [is] a vibrant community… People were looking for fun, unique things to do. There were things every weekend for all different ages and the costs were so low and many of the activities were free,” Witz said.