Bannock County Idaho Festival of Trees

Each November, the Festival of Trees turns a university performing arts center in Pocatello into a hall of decorated evergreens, gala evenings and charity bidding. The event is a fundraiser first and a spectacle second: rows of sponsored trees and holiday displays anchor several days of performances, parties and a silent auction, and the money raised flows to a roster of local causes. University news layers document the modern run of the festival from 2022 through 2025, always in the week before Thanksgiving, always opening on a Wednesday with a gala and closing on a Saturday. Behind that tidy modern pattern sits a longer, less completely documented story involving a school district, a pandemic pause and a business college that brought the trees back. For a visitor, the result is a festival whose recent editions are easy to describe precisely and whose origins are honestly vague; this article keeps both qualities in view.

About the Festival of Trees

The Festival of Trees is held in Pocatello, on the campus of Idaho State University. Pocatello is the county seat of Bannock County, so the festival sits in the county’s seat town rather than in one of its smaller communities. Organiser layers place every documented modern edition inside the L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center, the university’s showcase venue for concerts and stage productions.

In its current era the festival is run by the Idaho State University College of Business, which revived the event in 2022. University news layers describing the revival name Lookout Credit Union as the presenting sponsor. A sponsor underwrites; it does not organise, and the credit union’s role is recorded here as sponsorship only, never as management. A university news layer also quotes the event’s Festival of Trees Committee and refers to its Festival Director, wording recorded here as that layer prints it.

The festival had an earlier life under a different roof of responsibility. Before a pandemic recess, the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District 25 hosted the event for ten years as a fundraiser for its Education Foundation. That earlier era and the current college-led era belong to different organisers, and this article keeps them separate throughout rather than blending them into a single continuous management story.

Quick Facts

Item	Detail
Published name	Festival of Trees
Host town	Pocatello, Idaho, on the Idaho State University campus
County standing	Pocatello is the seat of Bannock County
Venue	L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center
Current organiser	Idaho State University College of Business, from the 2022 revival onward
Earlier organiser	Pocatello/Chubbuck School District 25, hosting for its Education Foundation during a ten-year run before the pandemic recess
Presenting sponsor	Lookout Credit Union, named as sponsor only in the university layers
Documented recent editions	November 16–19, 2022; November 15–18, 2023; November 20–23, 2024; November 19–22, 2025
General admission	Five dollars, published for the 2022 edition only; no general admission price was captured for 2023, 2024 or 2025
Address forms	South Eighth Avenue in the university’s own printed address; Sam Nixon Avenue on the venue’s own location page — recorded unmerged

History

No layer captured for this article states a founding year for the Festival of Trees, and none will be invented here. What the university layers do say is precise in a different way: the event ran for ten years under School District 25 before a pandemic recess interrupted it. Ten years is a duration, not a date. Counting backwards from the recess would manufacture a start year that no source actually prints, so the beginning of the district era is left unstated, exactly as the record leaves it.

For a useful comparison, see the Bannock County Idaho Pumpkin Fest Festival for another county festival.

The recess itself is firmly documented by its absence of editions. The university layers state that there was no festival in 2020 and none in 2021, the pandemic years when large indoor gatherings across the region were suspended. The event that returned in 2022 was therefore a revival, and the layers treat it as one: the College of Business took the festival up, the Stephens Performing Arts Center became its documented home, and a presenting sponsor appeared in the coverage.

The revival edition ran from Wednesday, November 16 to Saturday, November 19, 2022, opening with the Grand Holiday Gala. A university news layer set general admission for that edition at five dollars, the only general admission price published for any year in the record. The same 2022 coverage describes gala and other tickets folded into sponsorship packages; those packages were sponsorship components, not a public gate price, and they are recorded as such.

The 2023 edition ran November 15–18, again opening with a Wednesday gala, that year from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., followed by general days on Thursday and Friday from noon to 8:00 p.m. and a children’s tea party on the Friday. In 2024 the festival ran November 20–23 with a Wednesday gala from 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., general admission hours on Thursday and Friday from noon to 8:00 p.m., and a Saturday running from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. A university news layer documents the 2025 edition across November 19–22, confirming the Wednesday-to-Saturday November pattern held for a fourth consecutive revival year.

What to Expect

The centrepiece is the trees themselves: decorated holiday trees and displays arranged through the performing arts center, each one part of the fundraising effort. Around them the documented programme, drawn from university layers across 2022 to 2025, includes the opening Grand Holiday Gala, a Children’s Royal Tea Party, a Breakfast with Santa, daily musical performances and a silent auction. The gala opens the run; the general days that follow mix tree viewing with performances and family programming.

Because the festival is a fundraiser, the beneficiary roster matters, and it changes. For 2025 a university news layer named All About the Animals Coalition, Friends of the Edson Fichter Nature Area, Pocatello Free Clinic and Walk to End Alzheimer’s, alongside the standing beneficiaries Idaho State University Scholarships, Make-A-Wish Idaho and the School District 25 Education Foundation. The 2022 list additionally named the Portneuf Valley Boys and Girls Club. That club belongs to the 2022 list as published; it is not carried forward into the 2025 roster here, because beneficiary lists are fenced by year and merging them would misstate both.

The family programming deserves its own note. The Children’s Royal Tea Party appears in the documented programme across the revival years, and the 2023 events-guide layer places a children’s tea party on that edition’s Friday. Breakfast with Santa gives younger visitors a second anchor event, and daily musical performances turn the tree hall into a concert space throughout the run.

Planning Your Visit

Work backwards from the shape of the week. Every documented revival edition opens on a Wednesday evening with the gala and then offers general days through Saturday, so a visitor choosing between the gala’s formal opening and the quieter general sessions is choosing between two different events in the same hall. The 2023 and 2024 layers give the fullest hours: general admission from noon to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, with Saturday hours in 2024 running 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Budget with one firm figure and one honest unknown. Five dollars was the published general admission for the 2022 edition, stated by a university news layer for that year alone. No general admission price for 2023, 2024 or 2025 was captured in any layer found, so no current price is asserted in this article; a visitor should confirm the gate price for the year they attend rather than assume the 2022 figure still stands. Gala attendance has historically travelled inside sponsorship packages rather than a simple ticket, another detail worth confirming in advance.

Finding the venue means navigating the university campus. The organiser layers name the L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center as the festival’s home. Two address forms circulate and are recorded here unmerged: the university’s own printed address stands on South Eighth Avenue, while the venue’s own location page prints a Sam Nixon Avenue address for the center. Neither form is settled against the other in this article; the center’s name is the reliable landmark.

No attendance figure is published in any layer found, so crowd expectations cannot be quantified here. Contact details for the festival appear in the university layers, but no contact value is reproduced in this article.

Families should note that the tea party documented on the Friday of the 2023 edition puts the strongest family offering mid-run, while the Saturday session’s late-afternoon close suits visitors travelling in from elsewhere in the county.

A Sample Itinerary, Framed on the 2024 Edition

The fullest documented shape belongs to the 2024 edition, November 20–23, and this itinerary follows that year’s published hours as an example of how the festival unfolds.

• Wednesday evening: arrive for the Grand Holiday Gala, which in 2024 ran from 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., and take a first walk among the decorated trees on opening night.
• Thursday: return during general admission hours, noon to 8:00 p.m., for a slower viewing of the displays and the day’s musical performances.
• Friday: use the second general day, again noon to 8:00 p.m., for the silent auction, revisiting favourite trees before bidding closes.
• Saturday: close the festival between 11:00 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., catching final performances and the last of the displays before the run ends.

How It Compares

The university hosts a separate Tree Lighting Festival, run by the Union Program Council at the Pond Student Union in early December, with free entry. That is a different event from the Festival of Trees, staged by a different campus body in a different building, and its free status belongs to it alone — nothing about its admission or programme is transferred to the Festival of Trees here. Other Festival of Trees events exist as well, including one in Preston in Franklin County and namesakes in other states; each is a separate event with its own organisers and history, and none of their facts are imported into this account.

Checklist

• Confirm the current year’s dates and gate price before travelling, since only the 2022 general admission price was ever captured.
• Decide between the Wednesday gala and the general days; they offer different atmospheres in the same venue.
• Navigate by the Stephens Performing Arts Center’s name, because the university and venue address forms differ.
• Note the Saturday closing hours, which ended earlier than the weekday sessions in the documented years.
• Check which beneficiaries the current year supports before bidding in the silent auction.
• Leave time for the daily musical performances alongside the tree displays.

Beyond the Festival

Pocatello’s standing as the Bannock County seat gives the festival a civic backdrop: courthouse business, a downtown core and the university all sit in the same town, and the festival’s earlier life under the school district ties it to the town’s public institutions as much as to the campus that now hosts it. The district connection survives even in the revival era, since the School District 25 Education Foundation remains among the standing beneficiaries named in the 2025 coverage — a thread between the festival’s two eras that the layers themselves preserve.

Why the Festival Matters

A decorated-tree fundraiser is a familiar American format, but this one’s record shows an institution being handed between generations of local organisations: a school district foundation carried it for a decade, a pandemic stopped it, and a university business college restarted it with named local charities — an animal coalition, a nature area’s friends group, a free clinic — sharing the proceeds with scholarships and a wish-granting charity. The documentation is unusually candid about what it does not know, from the unstated founding year to the missing recent gate prices, and the festival’s significance is best read the same way: as a durable piece of Pocatello’s charitable calendar whose outline is clear even where its earliest chapter is not.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the Pocatello Festival of Trees actually begin?

Nobody in the record says. University layers state that the event ran for ten years under School District 25 before its pandemic recess, but no layer prints the year that run began, and this article does not compute one from the ten-year wording. The first firmly documented edition of the modern record is the 2022 revival.

Who organises the festival now, and who handled it before?

The Idaho State University College of Business has organised the festival from the 2022 revival onward, with Lookout Credit Union as presenting sponsor — a sponsorship role, not an organising one. Before the pandemic recess, the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District 25 hosted the event for ten years as a fundraiser for its Education Foundation.

Is five dollars still what visitors pay to get in?

Five dollars was the general admission published by a university news layer for the 2022 edition only. No general admission price for 2023, 2024 or 2025 was captured in any layer found, so the current charge, whatever it is, is not asserted here.

Which causes did the festival support most recently?

The 2025 beneficiary list named All About the Animals Coalition, Friends of the Edson Fichter Nature Area, Pocatello Free Clinic and Walk to End Alzheimer’s, plus the standing beneficiaries Idaho State University Scholarships, Make-A-Wish Idaho and the School District 25 Education Foundation. The 2022 list additionally named the Portneuf Valley Boys and Girls Club, a name kept in its own year here.

What to Expect From the Next Bannock County Idaho Festival of Trees

How often is Bannock County Idaho Festival of Trees held?

The documented revival-era record shows an edition in each year from 2022 through 2025, following the earlier district era and a pandemic recess with no 2020 or 2021 edition. That is the pattern the layers support; the record does not guarantee an unbroken future run.

When is the next Bannock County Idaho Festival of Trees?

No 2026 edition is announced in the record captured for this article. The documented editions all fall on a Wednesday-to-Saturday span in November, in the week before Thanksgiving, so that is the window the pattern suggests — but no future date is confirmed or presented as settled here.

Will the dates change?

They have stayed consistent in shape across 2022 to 2025, shifting only with the November calendar itself, but consistency is not a promise. The gala start time already varied between documented years, and any future edition’s exact dates and hours would need to be confirmed from the organiser’s own announcements.

Closing

The Festival of Trees in Pocatello is a fundraiser with two lives: a decade under a school district, a pandemic silence, and a revival under a university business college that has now documented four consecutive November editions. Its trees, gala and auction are well evidenced; its founding year and current gate price are not, and this account has left both exactly where the record leaves them.