S.L. firms rally to stave off Scrooge (City Hall)

Last year, Salt Lake City stepped in and saved Christmas. This year, it's playing Scrooge.

City Hall may be acting miserly, but downtown businesses are banding together to keep the Christmas spirit alive, planning a return of the beloved Jingle Bus, live reindeer, free carriage rides and complimentary milk and cookies for shoppers.

There's also a massive marketing campaign aimed at 70,000 households in Salt Lake and Davis counties set to kick off the week before Thanksgiving.

"Kind of our overall theme for the holidays is that the downtown malls are a wonderful tradition with all the displays and lights," Crossroads Plaza marketing manager Christ Stanger said. "(We) are trying to recreate the tradition that people remember and love."

The campaign is a cooperative effort of downtown interests, including the three downtown malls — The Gateway, Crossroads and ZCMI Center — and designed to make up for a lack of city participation this year.

A year ago, the City Council allocated $550,000 to fund, in part, a Christmas sprucing up of Main Street for 2002 and 2003. The sprucing was designed to entice hordes of suburban shoppers away from Wal-Mart and into downtown.

But this year, the Grinch-like city revoked the Christmas funds and placed the money elsewhere in the $163 million General Fund.

"We didn't feel like the project was going quite to the degree we anticipated," City Council Chairman Carlton Christensen said.

So gone are last year's street entertainers, vacant store-front window displays and Swedish women on corners hawking wassail.

The city will light its warming fires on Main Street during the weekend after Thanksgiving. However, economic development manager Alison McFarlane said she didn't know if they would continue into December.

And while street performers and store-front decorations are gone, downtown businesses scraped up enough money to save the Jingle Bus — a free, double-decker British-style vehicle that will shuttle shoppers throughout downtown all season.

"We're just trying to create a tradition of holiday spirit that people are used to," said Mindi Nordfelt, marketing manager for ZCMI Center. "We would have all loved it (if the city would have participated), but it was just a matter of the city budget."