The Wizards of Winter bring holiday rock to Presentation Hall the Sunday after Thanksgiving

The story-driven holiday rock show, featuring alumni of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and more, plays Mayo Civic Center on Sunday, Nov. 29 at 5 p.m.

The leftovers will be gone, and on Sunday, Nov. 29, a five-o'clock crowd will be filing into the Grand Lobby at Mayo Civic Center. The Wizards of Winter are booked for CH Mayo Presentation Hall that evening — the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which is about as clean a start to the season as Rochester gets.

The show was announced Oct. 14. Ticketmaster lists a 5 p.m. start in Presentation Hall, the 1,084-seat room inside the civic center at 30 Civic Center Drive SE, and the Mayo Civic Center has the date on its own calendar as one of its holiday-season events. Tickets are through Ticketmaster. If you're picking up at will call, the venue says the window in the Grand Lobby opens no earlier than 3 p.m. on the day of the show.

If you've seen Trans-Siberian Orchestra and wanted the same thing in a room where you can see faces, this is close to that idea. The Wizards of Winter bill themselves as a holiday rock group, and the lineup draws on players whose résumés run through Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Rainbow, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent and, from the other end of the spectrum, Broadway and NBC's The Voice, according to the band's site. The show is built around a holiday story, with narration threaded between the songs, rather than a straight run of carols with the guitars turned up.

Rock-concert guitars, a storyteller's structure and a room small enough to see the players' hands.

The material is the band's own as much as the standards: their album The Magic of Winter anchors the story, and they've since put out an official PBS live album with more than two hours of music and narration, per the band's store and press pages. It is unapologetically a holiday production — narration and a tale to follow — which is exactly why it works as a family outing as much as a concert.

Presentation Hall is a good fit for that. It's a 1,084-seat room, and an early Sunday start means the kids are home at a reasonable hour and nobody has to call in to work Monday.

For a lot of Rochester families, the weekend after Thanksgiving is when the season officially begins. This is an easy way to mark it.

Sunday, Nov. 29, 5 p.m. Grab tickets before the holiday calendar fills up.

Sources: Mayo Civic Center (mayociviccenter.com); Ticketmaster — Wizards of Winter, Rochester, MN, 11-29-2026 (ticketmaster.com); Ticketmaster — CH Mayo Presentation Hall at Mayo Civic Center (ticketmaster.com); The Wizards of Winter — Official site (thewizardsofwinter.com); The Wizards of Winter — Press (thewizardsofwinter.com); The Wizards of Winter — Wizards of Winter Live (thewizardsofwinter.com); The Wizards of Winter — The Magic of Winter CD (thewizardsofwinter.com)