Holiday on Ice

White text on blue background with a white ribbon holding a keychain type fob with a plastic white iceskate

Holiday on Ice is a traveling, family friendly, ice skating show. Beginning in 1943, Emery Gilbert came up with the idea of making portable ice skating rinks, complete with refrigeration units that could be taken around the world and used for professional ice skating shows. He contacted two men for help, Morris Chalfen, who procured the financing, and George Tyson, who would coordinate the shows. Thus, Holiday on Ice was born. It featured professional skaters with lavish sets and costumes, skating to popular music with chorus line kick routines and the signature wagon wheel move, where skaters would join each other by linking arms and creating the spokes of a wagon wheel. Fireworks would always end the shows.

Holiday on Ice would take on the Ice Vogues skating show and would go international, traveling to many countries, while Holiday would stay in the U.S. From 1953-56, movie star Sonja Henie joined the Holiday on Ice family, she would tour internationally for those three years. In 1959, the show even toured Russia for the first time. And in 1963, tragedy would strike the show, when a gas leak at a show at the Indianapolis state fairground exploded killing 74 people.