Welcome back, Frosty! The Wanamaker Light Show will return this year.

The Light Show is saved.

Money must be raised, ownership settled, and a long-term preservation plan devised.

But for this holiday season at least, a great Philadelphia tradition is all but assured to continue: The charmingly low-tech beating heart of holiday time in Philadelphia that began in 1956 as the Wanamaker Light Show will be back this Christmas.

Yes, Dickens Village, too.

The Philadelphia Visitor Center, in partnership with Wanamaker Building owner TF Cornerstone, is expected to announce a campaign Friday to raise about $350,000 to bring the two attractions back this winter and to begin planning for their care in perpetuity.

In addition, as part of a separate but coordinated effort, programming is falling into place to reopen the Wanamaker Grand Court this September and transform it into a busy pop-up performing arts center for four months to demonstrate the space’s long-term potential.

Beyond these next few months, though, the future of the Light Show and Dickens Village remains murky. Renovation of the building is slated to begin in February and last two years, and it’s likely that the Grand Court will not be able to function during most or all of that time.

The continuation of both the Light Show and Dickens Village was thrown into doubt when Macy’s closed its Center City location in March after 18 years of occupying the former John Wanamaker store.

Now for the first time, stewardship of the Light Show will pass from a retailer to a nonprofit.

Kathryn Ott Lovell, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Visitor Center, said that when she first considered the prospect of the group presenting and preserving the Light Show, she approached it as a “lifelong Philadelphian and a mom.”

“That was my visceral sort of emotion,” she said.

Then she started digging into the numbers — 2,000 visitors per hour for the Light Show and 10,000 a day for Dickens Village.

“Once we heard that, then we started to think, ‘Wow, this is not something that we can afford to lose from an economic development standpoint.’”

A study Ott Lovell subsequently commissioned from Econsult Solutions Inc., a Philadelphia-based economics, planning, and public policy consultancy, estimated that the two attractions drew about 400,000 people each season, generating about $30 million in direct and indirect spending in the city.

“There’s a whole experience where you do the Light Show and the Dickens Village, you do the holiday markets, you go to the Comcast building to do their experience, the Delaware waterfront has a whole Winterfest experience,” said Ott Lovell. “You could spend two, three days outdoors in Center City Philadelphia in the dark of winter and not have done it all, and this is a huge part of that.”

Others agreed. Even before Friday’s announcement, the effort began attracting support, with the William Penn and Connelly Foundations each awarding $100,000 to the project. A wider campaign to raise smaller donations has been launched.

The new performing arts series in the Grand Court is being led by Opera Philadelphia and is centered on the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ. It is fully funded, thanks in large part to Frederick Haas, a Philadelphia philanthropist who can occasionally be heard playing the mighty instrument. The Wyncote Foundation, on whose board Haas sits, has awarded the project a $1 million gift, with additional funds from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and TF Cornerstone.

“These pop-up concerts are opportunities for people to easily access the glory, the scale, the catharsis of this music and that organ in particular,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, Opera Philadelphia’s general director and president. “This is an emotional place for people that they remember from going every year or going when they were a kid or lying on that floor and being a part of it or shopping in the store. So why not take that meaningful place and bring people back to it and fill it with beauty?”

Opera Philadelphia is still working on programming for the space, but the first concert, on Sept. 7, features BalletX and the Bearded Ladies Cabaret in a program called Meet Me at the Eagle.

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee and Opera Philadelphia composer-in-residence Nathalie Joachim will lead programs, and organ concerts, vocal recitals, art installations, cabaret, and Halloween and Christmas programs are expected to be among the offerings.

Some of the concerts will be free, and others will follow the Opera Company’s $11-or-above pay-what-you-wish pricing structure.

Reactivating the former department store’s floors was appealing since “it hurts us to see a great space like this not being used in the way it should be even for a short period of time,” said TF Cornerstone senior vice president Jake Elghanayan.

The New York company also sees it as smart business to follow and support the interests of the community.

“We knew the Wanamaker Building was important when we came to Philly, but I think we’ve been a little overwhelmed, frankly, with how central it is to Philadelphians’ consciousness as an urban place, and so that further fuels the fire of these short-term initiatives,” Elghanayan said.

Long-term, the viability of the Light Show and Dickens Village as residents in the Wanamaker Building is an unknown.

“Still to be determined,” Elghanayan said. “Our vision is that this remains the center of commerce. I think John Wanamaker’s vision originally was that commerce and culture go together, and the Light Show and the organ are sort of part of a commercial vision that brought the community into the store. We would love for that to be the outcome in our renovation as well, but ultimately we are not a department store or anything store. We’re just the builders, and so we’ll have to work with whoever wants to actually occupy that space on a day-to-day basis and see what their vision for it is.”

The former Macy’s spaces are likely to be occupied by a series of smaller retailers, “but we’re not foreclosing the possibility that a larger retailer wants to predominate the space,” he said.

Elghanayan said he hopes the retailer question will be answered by the middle or end of 2026, but no one has yet committed. “We’re talking to some folks,” he added.

TF Cornerstone has taken ownership of the Light Show and Dickens Village from Macy’s, but that may change.

“Our goal would be to have the actual ownership go to the Atwater Kent [Collection at Drexel University] so that they can help us preserve it long term,” Ott Lovell said.

At the moment, the beloved once and future Wanamaker Light Show is in storage, still and quiet and awaiting its return, she said.

“To see it behind the scenes, it’s just plywood, it’s C7 light bulbs, and hot glue guns. It’s like a giant middle school project — Frosty’s just standing there, like a piece of plywood with a bunch of lights glued onto him. So it’s amazing that it can become so magical right once it’s all put together.”

To donate toward the return of this year’s Wanamaker Light Show and Dickens Village and their long-term care: SaveTheLightShow.org.