Downtown Holiday Fest

The girls came home from school last week with a flyer for the “holiday fest” in downtown S-town on Friday night. It included a parade of lights (yes!), the town tree lighting, and fireworks. The event said it went from 6-8pm, which meant that the fireworks were earlier than 10:00pm. Our people have never seen fireworks – because they do not stay up until 10pm. Ever. They are so tired by 8:00 every night that I can’t even imagine trying to stretch them that late. Disaster!

The girls and I immediately started plotting how we could get Mike on board. Turns out all we had to do was leave the flyer on the dining room table. The weather was so mild last week that when he saw it on Thursday night, he said “hey, we should go to this.” It’s official – Mike can no longer pretend he is a grinch!

Friday night found us shoveling frozen pizza (we did cook it first) into our bellies and trying our best to hurry short people out the door. Downtown was a madhouse! Our parking spot was borderline on its legality, but we went with it and hurried our selves toward the parade route. Because we were running late, we snagged a spot right at the start of the route. And it worked out perfectly!

Mike and I focused more on the “holiday” part than the “parade” part in our preparation. So neither of us thought for a second about candy. Big mistake! By the end, both our hats were overflowing with all the candy these people got. We learned that candy canes are not the best parade candy because they break when they hit the ground and Quinn was beside herself that she couldn’t find a non-broken one.

One of the floats threw mini Milky Ways and the girls dove on those like it was their job. And then brought them all to me, saying “here, mama. We got these for you.” The guy standing next to us was quite impressed at how well trained they were. I told him it’s probably because I ate every single one of their Halloween Milky Ways. He laughed like he thought I was joking. The Vs know that I was not!

The hockey association float threw foam pucks and I dove on those like it was my job. Because if I didn’t, I was afraid Dec would be run over. He was laser focused on getting one. The result – my house is under slapshot siege from two new foam pucks!

The very last group in the parade was the local snowmobile club – and who was representing but our very favorite Makai and his family. The kids were SO excited and they dumped SO MUCH candy in front of us!! After the parade finished, Mike ran our very full hats back to the car to dump the candy (and brought back our hats so we could wear them) and the kids sat on the curb and enjoyed a candy cane.

Then we headed to the center of town to watch them light the tree. We ran into C’s sister and her family (some of our favorites) and they made all the difference in us surviving until the fireworks at 8:00! After the tree was lit, we still had over an hour to kill. We scored an awesome viewing spot with our buddies, ran around with them, and played charades. Then we decided to walk around downtown and check out some of the happenings.

We waited in line for a photo with Santa (because we had plenty of time). This Santa didn’t ask what they wanted, but we have a breakfast date with Santa on Saturday so no worries there. We found some hot cider and marshmallows too. Then it was back to the hill to get ready for the fireworks. Dec, of course, had to go to the bathroom (for the third time). So he and I ran to the bar, made a nice lady laugh at our ridiculous conversation, and made it back just in time!! Quinn and Dec completely loved the fireworks. Fiona liked them okay, but thought they were way too loud. She was pretty stressed out the whole time, but made it through – and now she knows what to expect.

It was very late to bed, but they talked about how much fun they had all weekend. It was a blast to kick off the holiday season downtown – and Mike only relapsed into grinchy behavior a handful of times.