Tour de Lights is a Knoxville institution: a slow-rolling, luminous constellation of 2,000 or so bikes parading through the downtown vicinity, flooding the streets with an unapologetic, it-just-keeps-coming deluge of holiday cheer.
This year’s edition took place Saturday evening, beginning and ending at Mary Costa Plaza. It was, as always, a spectacle of costumed creativity. Beyond the ride itself, there was a Holiday Market and Peppermint Village complete with Santa for the training-wheels set.
Tour de Lights is a popular family-friendly event that carries a deeper message: bikes belong in our streets. It holds space for that message, literally, by closing the route to vehicle traffic with rolling roadblocks.
Julie Elfin is the programs and events coordinator for Bike Walk Knoxville, an organization that works to make sure all ages and abilities have safe and accessible streets for walking and biking. It co-presents Tour de Lights with Visit Knoxville. “We hear from a lot of people that this is the only day of the year when they ride on the road with their family,” Julie says. “Sharing the roads with traffic is not something they feel safe doing, especially if they have children or aren’t a superfast biker. So this creates a different experience for them.”
Now in its 18th inception, Tour de Lights burns bright. But like any fire, it started a spark. Beneath the tinsel and twinkle lights lies an origin story fueled by playful subversion, DIY spirit, and a rebellious vision for what bikes can mean to a city.
To trace it back to where it all began, I turn to Monika Miller. We decide to meet up the day before this year’s event to test-ride the route and talk through its history.
Monika’s an architect at heart—a big-picture thinker who’s always drawing lines, connecting dots, and seeing things in spaces that other people don’t. She’s passionate about bikes not just as a cleaner way to get around but as a way to shake up how people move through and engage with their world. Also—this part is important—Monika loves costumes.
She rolls in on a touring bike dressed in fur-lined boots, fishnet leggings and a coat adorned with wild horses. It’s about the most sensible thing I’ve ever seen her wear on a bike, but we’ll get to that later.
We set out toward Summit Hill and into Parkridge, and I am reminded how pleasant it is to experience a neighborhood at bike speed. You notice little things you might not otherwise – stuff on folks’ porches, Christmas decor, a little tree that’s growing rogue out of the roof of a church. And on neighborhood streets like this, you get where you’re going just about as fast as you would if you were in a car.
On Magnolia we spot a café I’ve apparently been driving past without noticing for years, called Likewise Coffee, and stop in for a warm-up drink. Monika trades her helmet for a fluffy white cossack hat and settles into a cushy chair with her mocha latté. I tell her to start at the beginning.
“After college I moved to Portland, Oregon, because it was into everything I was into: green living, sustainable architecture and bike stuff,” she says. “It’s like Bike City, USA.”
The part she failed to calculate—and what eventually drove her back to Knoxville—was Portland’s relentless gray drizzle. “My seasonal affective disorder could not take it,” she admits. But she didn’t leave empty-handed. “I got to observe how a city is run when you have proper bike infrastructure, and it’s amazing. There’s no reason people need to be driving everywhere, and Portland made it really easy with bike boulevards and bike lanes.”
Moving back to Knoxville in 2006, Monika was determined to bring some of the best aspects of Portland’s culture with her. She got a job at Elizabeth Eason Architecture, aligning with its focus on sustainability. She heard that the Metropolitan Planning Commission had a Bicycle Advisory Committee, headed by Kelly Segars, and showed up to a meeting.
Knoxville’s urban bike scene was already buzzing, largely in an underground sort of way. Critical mass and other rides, with varying states of organization or official sanction, let cyclists roll deep, not just for safety but to remind the city, “Hey, we’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.” The rides ranged from family-friendly, advocacy-minded neighborhood tours supported by the city to much rowdier, more irreverent happenings organized by folks who lived and worked in the downtown vicinity.
“You know, back before smartphones were as prevalent as they are today, people did things,” Monika says.
Ideas flowed in from other cities the old-school way—word of mouth, not Instagram. Local cyclists went to events like “Faster Mustache” in Atlanta, a 24-hour relay through downtown with checkpoints like getting a tattoo or finding a dead rat. They brought back wild ideas to adapt locally, spawning alley cat races like “Busternut,” “No Child Left Behind,” and a coffee shop-themed ride with a surprise finale of biking to the top of Sharp’s Ridge. (Spoiler alert: There was no coffee shop up there.) The Birdhouse hosted an infamous Bike Circus, including a lumberjack games-style “Huffy Toss.”
Tracy Jackson shared some photos of the era:
But for all the creativity flowing through Knoxville’s bike scene, costumes were still mostly uncharted territory. “Back in the day, if you can believe this, it was hard to get people to dress up in this town,” Monika says. “I know that people all secretly want to fly their freak flag, and we just have to provide them with more opportunities to do it.” Why not on a bike?
The year was 2007. Monika explains, “I had a vision for a Fourth of July ride with people on bikes wearing American flag streamers across their arms and back, like Evel Knievel.” So, naturally, she ordered a stash from a car dealership supply website. “I remember 17 people showed up and we started at my house over in Park Ridge. We might have been a small group but thanks to the USA streamers we had 100% costume participation, and my friend Eli hauled a boom box in a kid trailer.” This inaugural ride went on to become a juggernaut in its own right.
At the next Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting, Elle Colquitt, one of the committee members, mentioned that they’d seen a group of cyclists decked out in USA gear. “And I was like, yeah, that was me and my friends,” Monika says.
Committee member Caroline Cooley had an idea: “She said, ‘We should do something like this for Christmas,’” Monika recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yes, and it will be at night, with costumes and lights. Tour de Lights!’”
The goal was simple but impactful: to show everyday people that bikes could be a practical, joyful way to navigate the city—day or night, any season, and in whatever clothes you feel like wearing. They got to work, designing a flyer and formulating a route. They aimed to keep it as flat as possible, but also have it somewhere that they could see some Christmas lights, like Fourth and Gill. It would start and end at Market Square.
The first Tour de Lights took place on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007. “And I just remember thinking, ‘Maybe 20 people are going to come, and there’s going to be hot chocolate at the end.’ And then 75 people showed up, and we were absolutely shocked at this ‘huge’ turnout.”
The next year, 200 people showed up, and 300 the year after that. And it just kept ballooning from there. And while Tour de Lights retained its grassroots charm—costumes that veered into the absurd, boombox trailers, revelry, ridiculousness, and an unofficial afterparty at Preservation Pub—the growing numbers meant it needed more structure and support.
In the early days, the ride operated with little more than a few volunteers keeping things in order. As the event grew, however, the city stepped in to help manage the larger crowds and direct road crossings that made it safe for everyone. Eventually the ride outgrew Market Square and was moved to its current location.
In the years since, others have taken up the mantle of organizing the Tour de Lights. The event has grown up, and Monika says the participation level and effort people put into costumes is beyond her wildest dreams (battery-powered lighting has come a long way!) “And the infrastructure has grown up around us too,” she says. “That actual on-street infrastructure is the most important part. Like how we rode on Magnolia just now on the bike lanes.”
While Monika stepped away from bike advocacy in 2015, she says, “I still hope the city honors the commitments we fought for back then. The real goal is to create streets where people feel safe riding solo, not just in a crowd of 2,000 with a police escort. That’s how we build a vibrant, healthy and fun city.”
All this is on my mind the following evening during Tour de Lights. I’m riding with our 5-year-old, but when he decides to bail at his aunt’s house in Parkridge, I take off. Now flying solo, I pedal as hard as I can just for the sheer “woohoo!” of it, streaming past Santas, reindeer, whole families in matching pajamas, and at least one Elvis. The streets are ours – bikes stretching as far as the eye can see. Onlookers sit out in their yards and crowd downtown sidewalks, cheering “Merry Christmas!” and reaching out for high-fives.
Cars are backed up at intersections and, sure, some drivers might be … triggered by too much joy on their commute. But maybe a few see it as Monika envisioned it all those years ago and as so many people are experiencing it tonight—bikes as more than just a means of getting around, but a way to bring people together, reconnect with the spaces we inhabit, embrace a little weirdness, and spread a lot of joy.
