Small Town Christmas - Part One

Our weekend of local Christmas activities began at the city community center last night. A year ago they started what I hope will become an annual tradition. I think that is the city's hope as well. They set up lights around the city center, including around the children's park, the community center, the police station, the library, the chamber of commerce and city office buildings. On the weekend of the tree lighting they have some food and craft vendors, musical performers, children's crafts hosted by the library workers, storytimes, and other displays by miscellaneous organizations.

We didn't get a chance to see everything, because the boys ended up spending more time on certain activities. The first things they wanted to see were the electric trains in an indoor display. The boys also enjoyed watching an outdoor train set up by the husband of "The Christmas Lady." The Christmas Lady is a local celebrity who always sets up an unbelievable amount of lights and figures and decorations of all sorts. In the past, she always set up these displays in her yard and home. She opened it up to the public for the month of December. Last year she collaborated with the city to set up her Christmas decorations at the city center. It was great. Although she did not set up her things this year, I hope that she will do it again next year.


The stringing-Fruit-Loops-on-a-necklace craft was a huge hit with the boys. We dropped about half the Fruit Loops on the floor, but the boys still ended up eating most of them anyway.... They also enjoyed decorating a folder like a reindeer.
We made a short stop at the "Reindeer Games" where the boys tried out a ring toss and bean bag toss.

We posed in front of a fake Santa, and Ryan posed with the real Grinch.

We craned our necks trying to see the top of the big Christmas tree. Ryan tried out a pair of glasses that I splurged on (for $2.00). They are these cool "prism" glasses. When you look at the lights of a Christmas tree the glasses make the lights appear as a particular shape. There were three styles to choose from: snowflakes, the star of Bethlehem, or a snowman. The boys agreed on the snowman. They work on other lights too, including the moon--a great big snowman moon. Quite fun.

Todd took a somewhat blurry photo of me. I kind of like the idea of someone else helping to take the family photos.

Merry Christmas!