...and visit Winterhaven, the Tucson neighborhood that puts on its own festival of holiday home-decorating every December. I love going to Winterhaven; I enjoy looking at Christmas lights, and it's fun to see the different themes each house puts up. The level of creativity & theatricality is pretty breathtaking sometimes.
This year, Nathan stayed home with Aurora to work on a "special project" (more on that later), and I took Lorelai & Celeste with me. To make sure we got there in time, I took them out to a fine dinner ("fine dinner" for kids = McDonald's) beforehand. Then we went & found parking (usually, all the free parking for Winterhaven is at least a few blocks away from the neighborhood itself), and went sight-seeing. Here's some of the highlights from Winterhaven 2011:
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| This whole house was redesigned gingerbread-style. Being a brick house, the effect was pretty amazing. I love it! |
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| I'm not a huge fan of the Cars franchise, but I thought this was one of the more clever home designs. There were about a dozen life-sized cutouts all over the property, including Lightning McQueen pulling a sleigh suspended in the trees! Plus, the whole facade of the house was redesigned to look like Flo's Cafe. Neat! |
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| Here was a mideval-styled home, complete with a dragon pulling a handcart full of toys. The wedding proposal at the top of the castle is for real, too! (She said yes. We asked.) |
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| This house was covered head to toe with lights, reminding me of a Christmas movie favorite, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. They also had set up a big screen and were showing Christmas films throughout the night. |
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| There's always at least one "current events"-styled house, and this was it. "Occupy X-Mas!" There was a tiny tent in front festooned with Christmas lights, and lots of misfit toys were lounging around in front. On the other side of the lawn was a teddy-bear "Tea Party." Get it? Get it? |
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| This home is possibly the most impressive...it's all wired together & performs a sound/light show every few minutes. As you can see, it even has a choreographed Bellagio-style back-lit water fountain out front! Really cool. |
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| The "Harry Potter"-themed house is always one of my favorites! |
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| It was a pretty cold night (it went below freezing), so the girls were pretty chilly...but they still had lots of fun! |
After a long drive home in the warm car, we were all pooped...and slept in the next morning (Saturday--Christmas Eve Day!). However, "Santa" came a little early this year to make a special delivery to our backyard:
Behold, Nathan's "special project"! We had hoped to have the trampoline assembled in time for Christmas morning, so Nate started working on it while we were at Winterhaven the night before. However, my husband was just too efficient, and so it was ready to go on Christmas Eve morning! Not that the kids minded, of course...
After assembling the trampoline, it was a pretty quiet Christmas Eve; I just cleaned the house and made Rice Krispie Treats for "Santa." I always like the look of the tree once the presents are all underneath it:
You probably all know the drill--kids haul you out of bed; presents randomly torn open; a day of eating junk food, playing with toys, and otherwise being totally useless. We did have to go to church for a little while in the afternoon...it was a short Christmas-themed sacrament meeting, and I played "O Holy Night" for a soloist. Other than that, my time at church was blissfully responsibility-free.
We also got a Wii game console this year, and thus our dreams of entertaining the girls with lots of cartoons, and the parents' dream of streaming Netflix through our television, were simultaneously fulfilled. Here's what our girls looked like for much of the following week:
But not all of our post-Christmas week was spent in total indolence. Nathan & I were gearing up for our 10th wedding anniversary extravaganza! I'll write more about that next time.
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