Candlelight Christmas

Sometime around the end of November I won a family pack of tickets from a local radio station to Candlelight Christmas at This is the Place Heritage Park.  For those not familiar with this special park, it is where several original pioneer building have been relocated.  Mostly during the summer months volunteers in Pioneer Era clothing will reenact events and tell you about pioneer life and the historic buildings.  I will state it right here, I think it would be fun to volunteer one summer to "work" as a pioneer.  I could even dress up my little girls as pioneer children!

On Saturday, Ed and I went out on a double date with his brother and wife to Candlelight Christmas and had such a good time.  It is geared towards families and I think in a few years when Lucy is old enough to walk and stay with us I would like to take them.

I loved learning about a simpler Christmas that would have been celebrated by the pioneers.  Often they would have only one Christmas Tree for the entire village.  

We learned out the first stockings and the story of St. Nicholas.  And made several crafts, which I brought home for the girls.  We put together the bird food treat (for the birds) and we will put out the magical reindeer food on Christmas Eve.

There were live reindeer to see as well as Father Christmas.  I'm actually grateful that Olivia wasn't there to see Father Christmas.  It looked like some guy dressed up and not even trying to fill the part.  I'll keep our Santa for now.

I really enjoyed the dancing although on one of the dances I lost my partner.  The women would move one place to the right after each round and on one of the rounds my partner walked off.  I ended up sitting out the rest of the dance.  It was soon followed with the Virginia Reel.  I would have loved to stay longer and dance but I was worried about getting back to Lucy before it was too late.

Overall it was a great night and I look forward to doing it again in the future.

(Thanks to thisistheplace.org for the photos!)