Lights, Lights, Lights! (and traditions)

On Friday night the girls and I and my Mom went to this fabulous Festival of Lights. It was held in this adorable shopping village in Mystic. The village is a great place to go anytime of year - it has hundreds of cool little gift shops and a quaint church in the middle and a duck pond. My kids always call it 'the duck place' because there are SO many ducks and the girls love to go there to feed them.

Anyway, this quaint little village is right next to the Aquarium that we love so much. So both the village and the aquarium were having this Festival of Lights the other night. It was free and they had a bazillion lights everywhere and thousands of luminaries lining every walkway. There were also all kinds of musical groups - carolers, children's bands, string quartets, etc ... all spread throughout making beautiful music. Plus of course a couple different Santas - one of which was on stilts!

I will say ... it was wall to wall people! We had a very hard time finding parking and we didn't stay long because it was so crowded and so cold out. But it was still fun and neat to see all the lights and just nice to get out of the house and be festive!

The pictures are terrible, my camera does not take good pictures in bad lighting ... but hopefully you can see a little bit of all the beautiful lights ...





Tradition number 4 ...
THEN, last night we went to our favorite parade all year long. The light parade in a local town here is nothing short of amazing. It's LONG - over an hour! And it's amazing! This isn't your ordinary parade ... no marching bands and politicians and endless amounts of firetrucks. It's tons of gorgeous floats all decorated in lights - in fact the floats are in a contest for the best one. And in between floats are lots of dance troops in great costumes dancing to Christmas music. The whole parade is so much fun, so exciting and so bright with lights. Last night there were two floats that stood out that were just amazing - I couldn't believe we were at our local parade and not some fancy parade like at Disney or somewhere like that!

We went with our friends and the kids had so much fun. Our friends brought along hot cocoa for the kids and of course they got tons of candy which they loved. It was a great evening and is also one of our family traditions - one that I'm sure we will continue for years because it's just so much fun. (And no, I'm sorry but I have no pictures! My friend took some so if I can get them from her I'll post some - otherwise I'm sorry!)