New Year’s Eve in Golden Age Hollywood was never just a date on a calendar — it was a performance, a production, and a little bit of myth-making all rolled into one shimmering night. As the year’s final reel spun toward its last frame, the film colony prepared for its most indulgent ritual, a champagne-bright celebration that blended glamour, tradition, and the unmistakable heartbeat of a town forever chasing its next opening night.

Long before tinsel became a metaphor for Hollywood, it draped the trees of the stars themselves. In the Golden Age — from the 1920s through the 1950s — Christmas in Hollywood was both a heartfelt holiday and a perfectly choreographed production.

In the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the city of dreams sparkled with tinsel, floodlights, and Christmas carols, another set of candles burned quietly in the shadows — eight of them, glowing behind drawn curtains or on modest tabletops in Beverly Hills and Bel Air.

Once more Hollywood Boulevard was turned into a glowing tapestry of light, sound and color. Crowds lined the sidewalks under the glittering neon marquees as marching bands, vintage cars, floats and all kinds of familiar faces passed in front of Hollywood's famous landmarks. These photos celebrate the spirit, the color and the sparkle of the 93rd Annual Hollywood Christmas Parade, a time-honored holiday tradition that unites the community and keeps some of Hollywood's old magic shining bright.

Long before it was the home of red carpets, movie premieres, and star footprints in the sidewalk, Hollywood Boulevard was just another shopping street trying to find its niche. In the late 1920s, when the movie business was flourishing and retail development was struggling to keep up, local merchants needed a reason to attract holiday shoppers. Their answer was as whimsical as it was ambitious: Turn a section of the boulevard into a winter fantasyland, dubbed Santa Claus Lane.

Before the boulevards were lined with parades of balloons and marching bands, and long before televised football became a Thanksgiving tradition, Hollywood found its own way to give thanks. In the 1930s and ’40s, amid the klieg lights and commissary chatter, the studios of Los Angeles transformed the humble American holiday into something uniquely their own — a feast of glamour, gratitude, and carefully staged sincerity.

Before there were klieg lights, studio gates, or scores of hopeful extras waiting on Hollywood Boulevard, the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street held a far humbler landmark: a shuttered roadside bar known as the Blondeau Tavern. When filmmaker David Horsley arrived in Los Angeles in 1911, this deserted watering hole—closed, quiet, and gathering dust—was hardly an obvious birthplace for an empire. Yet it was here that Hollywood would take its very first bow.

Edward C. Hurd (often styled “E. C. Hurd”) arrived in Southern California during a period of great transition. According to historical records, Hurd amassed his early fortune in Colorado mines and then turned his attention westward, recognizing in the Los Angeles region an opportunity for transformation. 

In February 1932, Los Angeles was aglow in a new and strange kind of light — half sunlight, half stardust. Into this shining came a man who had changed the way the world saw light, the world saw time, the world itself. Albert Einstein was no film star, yet this was a town that measured celebrities in marquee letters. It treated him as such.