Community Christmas Celebration

KaNana tells Jolly Old Saint Nick (Dinnell) that she wants five puppies for Christmas.

I realized I have a little collection of posts with photos and no words accumulating in a virtual pile of drafts.  Doing all sorts of these Christmas activities while also trying to go to work and get papers grades and meet deadlines seems to take up more hours than I have in each day.

But I love all this evidence of Christmas time.

The now annual Christmas carnival seems to be bigger every year. There was a huge group at the community center last Saturday.

This is probably because they give away all sorts of prizes like this xbox Trance won. And the PS3, flat screen, kindle fire (and some regular kindles, too) along with a whole collection of other prizes. . . at least one small gift for every kid there. It's sort of unbelievable what they're able to give to the community when we have only a handful of really small businesses.

I love his little sister in the background running to check it out. Go Addison go!

And of course Santa was there.

And facepainting

And all sorts of little carnival games. Our ambulance crew traded in the straw search for an EMT-themed obstacle course:

Joe ready to time Christina & Kyle

Jeana & Emma race through

After the carnival they had the tree lighting and a little parade of lights.

On come the lights. . .

the caroling crew watching the tree from the trailer

Last year was the first year they did this parade. I think they only had one person. (So maybe they weren't quite starting yet?)

This year there were five or six floats, so that's quite an improvement!

Keilana, Azia & Dylan reserving some good spots on the trailer.

Lex found one of his buddies from school and got very excited to sit by him on the hay ride.

Since Lex decided to go, it meant I got to join the caroling and light parade fun too which wasn't actually my intention. The kids seemed to have fun even though the parade seemed to be about five times as long as I was expecting. Near the end I was beginning to feel like I might be a prisoner on this mission to spread Christmas cheer and light. Our town isn't that big, and I'm sure at any point I could have jumped off and ran back to my car, but leaving all my children unsupervised on a moving vehicle didn't seem like the best plan.

Especially since they all like the seats right on the edge.

Next year I think we need to recruit a choir director. We had all these packets of Christmas song lyrics, but not a clear plan about how we'd go about singing them. Also, not a lot of real loud singers except the trio of middle school boys who sang the first line or two of many random songs (Christmas and otherwise) from the top of the cab of the truck. Also there was another one next to me who shouted lyrics at loud as possible until he'd get stressed out because all the others singing quietly were usually at vastly different places in the song or just singing different songs entirely so it was hard to tell what exactly you were supposed to be singing.

But we still had pretty lights, all sorts of Christmas cheer, and excited children so I think it was a successful caroling expedition even without the real emphasis on the caroling.