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December in Minnesota always feels like a choose-your-own-holiday-adventure, and this week, the options swing from sugarplum surges to noir-tinged radio chaos to a rock opera still sparking after 50 years. 

Whether you’re leaning cozy, classic or a little unruly, the season’s full glow is sitting right there waiting for you to claim it.

The Big Wu with Kiss the Tiger at First Avenue — Dec. 13

The Big Wu have been swapping grooves and goodwill since their St. Olaf dorm-room dawn, expanding a homebuilt jam-band cosmos powered by long-form improv, loose-limbed harmonies and a fan community that behaves less like an audience and more like extended kin. 

 they’ll unfurl the songs that turned them into local fixtures, with Kiss the Tiger lighting the fuse on the front end. It’s an 18+ night, and in classic Wu fashion, first-timers tend to find themselves adopted before the encore hits.

‘Sam Shovel, Twelve Days of Chaos’ at The ARC in Winona — through Dec. 14

Theatre du Mississippi hauls its annual Christmas radio show back into the light

 and gives it a jaunty noir tilt, tossing 1934 detective Sam Shovel into a holiday storm front stocked with melted snowmen, rogue Santas and a Rudolph situation best left unspooled in person. 

Staged live and broadcast over the air from The ARC, the production savors its own throwback crackle: mystery nostalgia with a smirk. Eau Claire writers Jim and Jane Jeffries supply the script, Michael Opiola steers the chaos and the whole thing plays like a holiday card from the shadowy corners of December.

'The Nutcracker' at The Reif Performing Arts Center in Grand Rapids — Dec. 14

“‘The Nutcracker’ lands at The Reif Performing Arts Center

 with a flipped gender: out goes the Rat King, in sweeps the Rat Queen, while Tchaikovsky’s bright machinery keeps spinning. 

Reif dancers will also lead a Nutcracker story time at the Grand Rapids Area Library on Nov. 14. And if you’re Nutcracker-hopping this weekend, the ballet is blooming everywhere at once — Eden Prairie, Burnsville, Bloomington, Duluth, Mankato, Rochester — a statewide cascade of sugarplums.

European Christmas Market at Union Depot in St. Paul — through Dec. 21

More than a decade on, this St. Paul staple distills the glow of European winter markets without the airfare or the pre-holiday gauntlet of TSA. 

Union Depot turns into a small constellation of holiday decor

, cold-weather crafts, and the kind of food that ambushes your dinner plans: Glühwein steaming in the cup, French crêpes folded warm, Polish pierogi doing their quiet siren work. The entertainment hops from Irish dancers to Santa to a roaming group of Krampuses, all of it stitched together in a little burst of borrowed winter folklore.

‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at the Ordway in St. Paul — through Dec. 28

The rock opera that detonated half a century of gospel-tinged belting still comes in hot, its fuse lit back when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice reimagined the final days of Jesus as a distortion-heavy showdown over power, doubt and devotion. 

 it arrives in that sweet borderland between arena thunder and musical-theater polish, still humming with the electricity of the original concept album. Rice once pointed to Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” as the spark, and you can still feel that charge.

‘Women with Taste: Culinary Visionaries of the Twin Cities’ at Mill City Museum in Minneapolis — through May 31, 2026

 spotlights eight women who shaped the Twin Cities food landscape. Mill City Museum traces their arcs from the early trailblazing of Leeann Chin, Reiko Weston and Elvira Coronado to food journalist Sue Zelickson and General Mills economist Marjorie Child Husted, whose fingerprints are all over the invention of Betty Crocker. This exhibit is paired with the opening of the Minnesota History Center exhibit "Julia Child: A Recipe for Life."

Whatever path you pick, may it cut through the dark with a little music a little mischief and the kind of warmth only a Minnesota December can pull off.

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This week, the options swing from sugarplum surges to noir-tinged radio chaos to a rock opera still sparking after 50 years.

MN Shortlist: Holiday mischief And Minnesota traditions — 6 Picks For Dec. 12-18

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