For the last several years I have put off Christmas shopping until school was out, and it has all worked out fine. This year however, I quickly came to the realization that I had painted myself into a corner. Because of the way the dates fell, there was not enough time to have items shipped in between school being out and us leaving for our family festivities, so I actually had to hit the malls this year. The girl's last day of school was the 21st, and we headed down on the 22nd, so there was no time for any of the usual things we do, such as making cookies or mixing up 9-bean soup. It just seemed like there was no lead up at all to Christmas!
We left a bit late on the 22nd, so it was nearing dusk when we got to Ardmore. This provided the perfect opportunity to finally see the Ardmore festival of lights! For four years we have driven by this enormous display - you can see it from the highway - but it has always been too early, too late, we've been on a schedule, etc., so we have never stopped. Well, this time it was close to dinner time, and we were not on a strict arrival schedule, so we pulled off at got in line and waited for the gates to open.
The Festival of Lights is a drive-thru experience, about one and a half miles long, and has over 125 lighted displays. Many of them were animated, and lots of them went over the road, such as reindeer shooting a basketball over the road into a hoop on the other side.
We noticed that Santa is very athletic - there were displays of Santa and his reindeer playing basketball, volleyball, soccer, football, skiing and snowboarding, to name a few.
Each display was sponsored by a local business - most of which had no bearing on the display, but a few did. Santa bought his toys at Wal-mart's display, and banked a Citizen's bank.
Many of the displays were quite elaborate.
There was one over the road display where a boy and a girl had a snowball fight. The girl would throw the snowball over the road, and it would splat on the side of the boy's head. The girls liked that one, but Jerry wanted to know when it was the boy's turn to throw the snowball. He felt that there was a little gender discrimination going on there!
It was hard to get pictures, as the car was moving at a pretty good clip. We could slow down, but there was a long line of cars behind us, and we didn't want anyone to get irritated with us.
One of the most elaborate and large displays was this one of Noah's Ark. It was so big, it was hard to get a photo without some piece of the car in the way.
We were glad we stopped, because it was just what we needed to get our Christmas mood going. Thanks, Ardmore!
No comments:
Post a Comment