Christmas Lights Night

On Saturday, we decided to spend the night as a family looking at Christmas lights and going out for a special treat. We had to stop for gas and Ryan thought the first stop of our "outing" was awesome! "Mommy! Can I get out and touch the dinosaur?!"

Knock yourself out, kid.

Next, we headed out to Maurice, taking note of the farm places along the way. I decided lit-up moose are my favorite because they say, "Hey, I have antlers and live in a somewhat Arctic environment, do I count? I may not be as fancy as those hoighty flying reindeer, but if you are a homesteader on Alaska: The Last Frontier looking for 850lbs. of meat to get you through the winter, I'm worth my weight in..well, meat."  

Ryan decided that yellow lights were getting "boringer and boringer" (for the record, we have yellow lights on our house) so it was time to spice it up with the Old Fashioned holiday spirit of Maurice. We enjoyed looking at many of the houses and Ryan loved the Thomas the Train blow-up and the moving carousel. I liked the peacock and flamingo and the house with green lights projected onto it so it looks like the entire house is covered (Wade, you need to look into that.)

As we drove through the town, Ryan suddenly spotted...SANTA!  He was standing on a corner and we saw on the sign that they were having free Christmas treats at the city hall (or some sort of city building---there were a lot of pictures of past Miss Maurices, so that's my guess). We hopped out and got a candy cane, then headed inside for some cider and treats. What a fun little discovery! Thank you Maurice for this fun event and for decorating your town!

Cohen enjoying a stop in Maurice.

Next, we headed to Le Mars and followed the directions I'd gotten from friends to the biggest displays. Turn west at the stoplight by Bob's Drive-In onto Hwy 3. There is a big display in town a few blocks away that looks like you can get out and walk around on the sidewalk. Then, we headed 7 miles west and a 1/2 mile South (don't worry, you'll see if from Hwy 3) to a huge display! It had music playing and a guy handing out candy canes.  It reminded me of going to the Vander Ploeg farm near Middleburg when I was growing up. So fun, and Ryan was pretty amazed. He wanted to go play on the merry-go-round.

I had been giving Ryan clues during the whole trip about what the special treat was, but he was still surprised when we pulled up to the Blue Bunny Ice Cream parlor. He picked out the Scooper Hero ice cream that is red, blue and yellow. Adam and I picked special sundaes that ended up being enormous but really really good. Cohen got...puffs. Sorry, dude! We let him try the ice cream but he really doesn't like the cold.

We hadn't been to the parlor in a long time, so it was a fun treat and Ryan even liked looking at the displays upstairs.

Overall, we had a really fun night together and hope to make this a Christmas tradition.