Looking for something to do on Thursday? The Straight’s got you covered. Here are 75 events happening in or around Vancouver on Thursday, December 7.

CONCERTS

Vancouver-based electronic-rock duo Dear Rouge performs at the Commodore Ballroom, with partial proceeds to Covenant House Vancouver.

Paul Pigat and Paul Rigby host an evening of solo, duo, and band performances at the ANZA Club's Guitar Cabaret.

Victoria-based country-roots duo Twin Kennedy plays a Christmas show at Coquitlam's Evergreen Cultural Centre.

New York City indie-rock band Grizzly Bear plays the Orpheum Theatre, touring in support of new album Painted Ruins.

Canadian indie-rock singer-songwriter Emily Haines plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

BENEFITS

See more than 30 gingerbread creations designed by students, professionals, and amateur culinary artists at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver, with proceeds to Make-A-Wish B.C. and Yukon.

The Yule Duel outdoor Christmas carolling event in Gastown features a live jazz band and over 20 performances by local choirs, with proceeds to May's Place.

FOOD & DRINK

Learn how to make chocolate mousse, lava cake, truffles, and sauce at Kensington Community Centre.

FORUMS

Media critic Jay Rosen discusses why today’s crisis of trust in politics and journalism might be the best thing that happened to news media in a generation at SFU Woodwards.

Discover what it takes to be an entrepreneur and how to find the right business opportunity for you at the Vancouver Public Library's Kensington branch.

Learn how to use donation-based crowdfunding for your next campaign at the Alliance for Arts and Culture.

Vancity volunteers share their expertise to help you understand the real cost of payday loans and cash advances at Vancouver Public Library's Terry Salman Branch.

CHRISTMAS

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.

Make It! Vancouver's Handmade Market at the PNE Forum features more than 265 Canadian artists, makers, and crafters selling clothing, art, home decor, gourmet goodies, and baby and kid items.

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.

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

The Vancouver Christmas Market at Jack Poole Plaza features more than 75 vendor huts, authentic German food and drink, a carousel, a 30-foot-tall walk-in Christmas tree, live entertainment, and family-friendly activities.

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. 

KIDS' STUFF

Entertainment One and Round Room present a fully immersive musical production based on the animated TV series PJ Masks at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

SPORTS

The Vancouver Canucks take on the Philadelphia Flyers in National Hockey League action at Rogers Arena.

COMEDY

Paul Anthony's Talent Time's 10th annual Christmas special at the Rio Theatre features comedy by Charlie Demers, song and dance by Perry Ehrich's ShowStoppers, and seasonal favourites by the kids at Vanleena Dance Academy.

American comedian Gabriel Rutledge performs the first of three nights of standup at the Comedy Mix.

Canadian comedian James Kennedy performs the first of three nights of standup at Yuk Yuk's Comedy Club.

The Vancouver TheatreSports League presents Christmas Queen 4: Secret Santa, a holiday-themed comedy show that sees the Queen and Santa exchange bodies in a Freaky Friday-style magical sleight-of-hand.

ARTS ETCETERA

Evening of music, dance, and spoken word by local artists including Roxanne Charles, Brandi Bird, Prado, and Madeline Terbasket at Bill Reid Gallery.

Emcee Suzette Amaya curates an all-female lineup of Indigenous spoken-word and hip-hop performers from around the Northwest Coast at the The Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

Join CAG visitor coordinator Julia Lamare for a free lunch-hour tour of the current exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery.

Cirque du Soleil presents 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. 

Fight for Beauty at Fairmont Pacific Rim features public art projects undertaken with world-class creatives, architecture from architects who are artists in their own right, and fashion by some of the greatest designers in recent history.

LITERARY

Filmmaker, spoken-word poet, and mental-health activist Kagan Goh heads a lineup of TWS students, alumni, and local and touring authors reading poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at Cottage Bistro.

Celebrate the stories and art created this year at writer-in-residence events and get a preview of new and upcoming work by VPL writer in residence and comic artist Miriam Libicki at the Vancouver Public Library's Alice MacKay Room.

NEC Native Education College and Tradewind Books presents the launch of A Day with Yayah, by First Nations author and illustrator Nicola Campbell and Julie Flett at the Native Education Centre.

THEATRE

Opening night at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts of Bah Humbug!, in which Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol comes to life in modern-day East Vancouver.

The Daisy Theatre presents Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett's take on Charles Dickens's holiday classic A Christmas Carol, at the Cultch.

The Arts Club Theatre Company presents a performance at Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre of The Day Before Christmas, Stacey Kaser and Alison Kelly's play about a perfectionist who's desperately holding fast to her Christmas traditions.

The Vagabond Players present a traditional holiday pantomime based on the classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty at New Westminster's Bernie Legge 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.

Pacific Theatre presents Almost, Maine, director Kaitlin Williams's play about the joys and perils of romance, set in a small town in Maine.

As part of its Micro Performance Series, Boca del Lupo presents You Are It, a play that looks at how a female friendship develops, at The Fishbowl on Granville Island.

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

The North Vancouver Community Players present director Miles Lavkulich's version of Linda Sharp's play The Doctor of Oz: A Self-Help Panto, about a girl who travels to a magical land of self-help, at the Theatre at Hendry Hall.

Some Assembly Theatre Company presents writer-actor Nicholas Harrison's play How Star Wars Saved My Life at Performance Works.

Gateway Theatre presents a stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens's classic tale of a miser who changes his ways after he is visited by ghosts.

Performance at the Cultch's Vancity Culture Lab of The Realistic Joneses, Will Eno's play in which a man and a woman and their neighbours face life-altering problems.

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.

Vancouver Children's Choir and Brittanica Repertory Theatre present a reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol at Christ Church Cathedral.

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.

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

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.

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.

Bill Reid Creative Journeys at Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art celebrates the three phases of the artist's creative journey, Pre-Haida (1948-1951), Haida (1951-1968) and Beyond Haida (1968-1998).

Intangible at Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art exhibition spotlights six Coast Salish artists influenced by tradition as well as contemporary inspiration.

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.

Emily Carr: Into the Forest at the Vancouver Art Gallery is a collection of Emily Carr's forest paintings that highlight her continued exploration of the natural environment.

MUSEUMS

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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.

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

Free screenings at the Cinematheque of Anne Wheeler's Loyalties (above) and Martine Chartrand’s music-filled short "Black Soul" as part of the Canada on Screen series.

The Vancouver Golden Panda International Film Festival at Vancity Theatre includes 19 feature-length films and 33 short films from 25 countries and regions.

For all the latest Metro Vancouver event announcements and updates follow @VanHappenings.