The San Antonio Botanical Garden is turning up the wattage for a second year of Illuminate, its annual holiday light spectacular. From November 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, the retreat promises a "brighter, bolder, and more breathtaking" experience with new glowing lanterns and a calendar packed with theme nights.
This is the second year for the display, created in collaboration with Tianyu Arts and Culture, a Chicago-based subsidiary of a world-renowned Chinese light show producer. In 2024, the Garden switched over from its long-running Lightscape, a more explicitly holiday-themed event.
During its run, guests can stroll under illuminated flower tunnels, marvel at a galaxy of crescent moons and stars, and take selfies behind lanterns crafted to mimic butterfly wings. The Garden promises new displays this year, but locals will have to visit to spot all the differences.
Theme nights bring the fun all season.Photo courtesy of San Antonio Botanical Garden.
For the first time, Illuminate will also introduce themed nights throughout its run. Some are geared towards inclusivity, like sensory and family-friendly nights, while others extend holiday traditions like an ugly sweater party. The schedule crescendoes on New Year's Eve with an All That Glitters soirée.
The sparkling exhibit is open to all ages, but minors must be accompanied by adults. Entry to the roughly mile-long route is staggered every 30 minutes from 5:30-8:30 pm every day except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.
The San Antonio Botanical Garden is located at 555 Funston Pl. near Brackenridge Park. Tickets are on sale now for $23-$31 and $18- $24 for children. Admission for infants aged 0-2 is free.
Few people are strong enough to resist the lure of Girl Scout cookie season every year, with the cookies’ limited availability and unique flavors a strong incentive to indulge. But only the girls and their families who have sold the cookies know the joys and stresses of trying to get people to buy them, a process that is detailed in the new documentary, Cookie Queens.
The film by documentarian Alysa Nahmias uses the stories of four different girls to represent the nationwide ritual for the Girl Scouts. They include 12-year-old Olive in Charlotte, North Carolina, a longtime top seller; 8-year-old Shannon Elizabeth in El Paso, Texas, who wants to earn the reward of going to camp; 5-year-old Ara in San Diego, California, whose goal is modest compared to most other girls; and 9-year-old Nikki in Chino, California, who has to compete with her older sisters in the cookie-selling bonanza.
The girls represent a cross-section of both ages and backgrounds, with some girls coming from wealthy families and some girls dealing with more limited means. And how much money your family has makes a big difference, as not only does someone richer have more freedom with their time and supplies, but all scouts are required to reimburse the organization for every box they take in, regardless of whether they’re able to sell it or not.
That caveat makes the journeys of the four featured girls feel wildly different. It’s clear from the start that Olive and Nikki’s families don’t give a second thought to the personal economics of selling cookies, with each girl taking in thousands of boxes at the beginning of the six-week selling season. With both Olive and Nikki rightfully confident that they’ll have no problem offloading their supply, their stories turn to how selling is personally affecting them, with each trying to reconcile the fun of doing it with the pressure they feel from their family members.
Shannon Elizabeth’s story is more harrowing, as her parents feel a strong desire to help her accomplish her lofty goal, but worry that the cost might literally be too high for the family as a whole. More than once, the parents are shown fretting that they won’t have the money to pay back what they owe should they fall significantly short in their sales. Their selling approach, which includes walking through an empty swap meet and standing outside a chain restaurant at night, only adds to their stress.
The most fun story to watch is that of Ara, whose innocence is matched by her confidence. Her parents teach her how much money they’ll owe with her small goal of 55 boxes, but right away she takes on more responsibility than expected. She’s shown making sales pitches and tallying the total number of boxes she’s sold with little-to-no help from either her mom or dad. With her high voice, glasses, and a monitor on her arm to manage her diabetes, she becomes the cute and sympathetic part of the film.
There are times that the film starts to feel more than a little manipulative, however. While many of the moments documented come off as organic, some of them seem like Nahmias is actively guiding the participants in order to get a better story. This is especially evident with Shannon Elizabeth and her family, whose early struggles turn into a miraculous feel-good story by the end, a turnaround that seems implausible at best. Everything with them might have been aboveboard, but Nahmias and her team edit the family’s journey in a way that pushes a bit too hard for emotion.
Cookie Queens, which was produced by a company owned by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, helps to give insight into the business of selling Girl Scout cookies for those who’ve only been on the purchasing end of the transaction. The dedication of each girl toward selling their allotted supply proves fun and interesting, even if the filmmaker tries to gild the lily on occasion.
Theme nights bring the fun all season.Photo courtesy of San Antonio Botanical Garden.
