Looking for something to do on Thursday? The Straight’s got you covered. Here are 53 events happening in or around Vancouver on Thursday, December 28.

CONCERTS

Canadian singer-songwriter Honey Larochelle performs at the Railway Stage and Beer Café.

BENEFITS

The Festival of Hope at Havana Theatre features six days of music, theatre, and comedy and raises funds for Boden, a young man in palliative home care.

CHRISTMAS

Annual Lights of Hope display at St. Paul's Hospital features over 100,000 sparkling lights and raises funds for the St. Paul's Foundation.

Van Dusen Botanical Garden's Festival of Lights features outdoor light displays, dancing light shows, stories with Santa, live entertainment, a fireside lounge, the Make-A-Wish candle grotto, and sing-alongs.

Bright Nights in Stanley Park features a train ride through the forest decorated with lights, displays, and performers, with proceeds to the B.C. Professional Fire Fighters' Burn Fund.

See thousands of lights adorning the Capilano Suspension Bridge, canyon, Treetops Adventure, and Cliffwalk at Canyon Lights.

The Peak of Christmas at Grouse Mountain features holiday light installations around Blue Grouse Lake, Christmas movies, crafts, sleigh rides, skating, a gingerbread village, reindeer, storytime, and breakfast with Santa.

Lights at Lafarge features outdoor light displays, live entertainment, roving performers, hot chocolate and cookies, photos with Santa, family-friendly crafts, a holiday market, and choirs at Coquitlam's Town Centre Park.

Join Santa on a flight across Canada and on to the North Pole as he searches for his missing elves at Christmas at Flyover Canada.

Holiday Heights at Bloedel Conservatory features seasonal lights, music, and a holiday scavenger hunt.

FORUMS

Join moderator Meguido Zola at Vancouver Public Library's South Hill branch for a discussion about what Philosophers' Cafés represent to the people and communities that participate in them.

SPORTS

The Vancouver Canucks take on the Chicago Blackhawks in National Hockey League action at Rogers Arena.

COMEDY

Italian comedian Enrico Rennella performs standup at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre.

Comedian Ivan Decker performs the first of three nights of standup at the Comedy Mix.

The Fictionals and various Vancouver improvisers battle it out for the Quiplash Crown at Seven Dining Lounge.

ARTS ETCETERA

Cirque du Soleil presents a performance of Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities, a new production that takes you into the curio cabinet of an ambitious inventor who defies the laws of time, space, and dimension, at Concord Pacific Place.

DANCE

Ballet BC presents Alberta Ballet in a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre of the holiday classic The Nutcracker, featuring choreography by Edmund Stripe and Tchaikovsky's score performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

THEATRE

The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Onegin--Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille's musical about a dissipated rogue whose romantic charms stir the passions of the residents of a country estate--at Granville Island Stage.

Theatre Replacement's East Van Panto: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is a kid-friendly production at the York Theatre that sees the title character flee the wicked Queen of North Vancouver across the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, landing at the PNE.

The Arts Club Theatre Company presents a performance at Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, a stage adaptation of the Academy Award-winning animated film.

Carousel Theatre for Young People presents Joseph Robinette's adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, about four siblings who step through a wardrobe into an enchanted land, at Waterfront Theatre. SOLD OUT.

Final performance at Deep Cove Shaw Theatre of Norman Robbins's kid-friendly pantomime The Grand Old Duke of York, which tells the story of a conniving baron who cancels an annual fair and outlaws fun and laughter.

The White Rock Players Club presents the performance of director Alex Lowe's kid-friendly pantomime The Hunchback of Notre PANTO at Coast Capital Playhouse.

Metro Theatre presents a performance of the holiday pantomime Cinderella, which sees an underdog use her courage to go after what she wants.

GALLERIES

Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery offers insight into two distinctly different modes of painting that have come to dominate contemporary painting in Canada.

Polygon Gallery's inaugural exhibition, N. Vancouver, explores how a specific locale can be reflected through existing and newly commissioned artworks by artists from Vancouver and beyond.

Portrait of the Artist: An Exhibition from the Royal Collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery features more than 90 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculpture highlighting both the richness of the Royal Collection and the complex relationship that the British monarchy has had with artists for the last three and half centuries.

True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada at the Vancouver Art Gallery highlights the enduring legacy of Scandinavian design principles in Canada through works by Niels Bendtsen, Bocci, Karen Bulow, Kjeld and Erica Deichmann, Thor Hansen, Andrew Jones, Janis Kravis, molo, Carl Poul Petersen, Rudolph Renzius, and Marion Smith.

Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive at the Vancouver Art Gallery presents the latest findings of Vancouver-based artist Sawyer's ongoing research project that deftly reconstructs the life and work of the genre-defying, fictional artist Brettschneider.

MUSEUMS

City on Edge: A Century of Vancouver Activism at the Museum of Vancouver explores the history of Vancouver's street protests through over 650 images of street demonstrations, protests, and riots from the early 1900s to present day.

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC features Amazonian basketry, textiles, carvings, feather works, and ceramics both of everyday and of ceremonial use, representing indigenous, Maroon, and white settler communities.

In a Different Light: Reflecting on Northwest Coast Art at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC features more than 110 historical indigenous artworks and explores what we can learn from these works and how they relate to indigenous peoples’ relationships to their lands.

The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC takes visitors on a journey through the past 200 years of Salish wool weaving.

The Lost Fleet at the Vancouver Maritime Museum investigates the unjust 1941 seizure of 1,200 Japanese-Canadian fishing vessels following the bombing of Pearl Harbour through a collection of historic photographs, models of Japanese-Canadian-built fishing boats, fishermen’s tools, and replica documents.

ATTRACTIONS

At the Bloedel Conservatory you can take in more than 200 free-flying exotic birds and 500 exotic plants and flowers.

Celebrate winter with free skating in the heart of downtown Vancouver at Robson Square Ice Rink.

North Vancouver's Grouse Mountain features a Skyride to the peak with views of the city and the Pacific Ocean, as well as ziplines, a wildlife refuge, helicopter tours, paragliding, dining, and the Grouse Grind.

Mount Seymour features skiing and snowboarding, lessons, chairlifts, terrain parks, tubing and tobogganing, and snowshoe trails.

West Vancouver's Cypress Mountain features skiing and snowboarding lessons, snowtubing park, cross-country ski trails, downhill skiing and snowboarding trails, and snowshoeing tours.

The new Parq Vancouver features two luxury hotels, a 24-hour casino with 600 slot machines and 75 table games, eight restaurants and lounges, and the sixth-floor outdoor Parq.

Take a ride in an exterior glass elevator and get a 360° view of Metro Vancouver and the North Shore mountains at Vancouver Lookout.

Stanley Park features 400 hectares of trails, gardens, beaches, and West Coast rain forest, with scenic walking and biking along the 8.8 kilometre seawall.

The Vancouver Aquarium features almost 800 animal species in galleries ranging from Canada's Arctic to the Amazon rainforest.

Lighthouse Park features 10 kilometres of hiking trails, picnic areas, guided walks provided by the Lighthouse Park Preservation Society, and the historical 1912 Point Atkinson Lighthouse.

Science World features hundreds of interactive exhibits in five permanent galleries, live science demonstrations and workshops, and giant movies in the Omnimax Theatre.

MOVIES

Screening at the Rio Theatre of director Sean Baker's The Florida Project, about a precocious six-year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder and adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.

Screening at Vancity Theatre of California Typewriter, Doug Nichol's documentary about people whose lives are connected by typewriters.

Screening at Vancity Theatre of Lady Macbeth, William Oldroyd's film about a young bride sold into marriage who enters into an affair with a worker on her estate.

Screening at the Rio Theatre of Jane, director Brett Morgen's documentary about legendary primatologist Jane Goodall.

Screenings at the Cinematheque of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights and Terence Malick's Days of Heaven as part of the Essential Big Screen! series.

Screening at Vancity Theatre of Shakespeare Wallah, James Ivory's film about the adventures of a travelling theatre group in India during the final days of English colonial rule.

Screening at the Rio Theatre of director Christopher Nolan's 2017 war movie Dunkirk.

Screening at Vancity Theatre of Feng Xiaogang's film Youth, which chronicles the joys and travails of a provincial military-arts troupe, soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army whose duty it is to promote culture, revolutionary values, music, and dance.

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