Monday, December 1, 2008

Happy holidays? Bah Humbug.

With the best of intentions, I met up with some friends at Highland Park Village for their 32nd annual "Night of a Million Lights". I thought this would be a good way to get in the holiday mood and kick off my season of festive frivolity.

The evening started out well enough. We went to Starbucks to get an Eggnog Latte (that will be $4.52 please - each) and ran into this jolly elf (seen right with Little Man).














As we walked out into the HPV parking lot to find the festivities, we discovered this reindeer who must have taken a wrong turn at Ontario and ended up in Dallas. Little Man walked around the pen about 40 times before the reindeer finally stood still so he could pet it. It was not happy to be penned in. He wanted to fly away home and be with Santa.

There were several hundred people there to see the "show" which consisted of a man on stilts dressed like a Nutcracker Soldier (see right) wandering the parking lot, a Marionette show which Little Man said was "for weenies" and a dance teacher with her gaggle of girls performing a series of dances. The first was two tween girls dressed in kilts dancing a Riverdance jig to bagpipes. The second was a group of mini-Britney Spears wanna-be's doing their best pelvic thrusts to some Hip-Hop song (shudder). I watched these girls, just saying another prayer of thanks to Jesus that he gave me a stinky boy. He just wants to climb a tree.


They also had balloon artists and face painters, which is always fun for Little Man. He ran around with his balloon sword and whacked all of his friends. And complete strangers. Since the show was lame, we went over and got in line for the free carriage rides.


Once the official tree was lit, they opened up the carriage rides and we took a spin around a couple of blocks to see the four houses that had their Christmas lights up already. We made the best of it though, singing Jingle Bells at the top of our lungs.

After our carriage ride, we gathered up the men-folk, who had ditched the women and kids to have drinks at Mi Cocina (not that I can blame them) and headed over to Manny's for dinner. All in all, it was fun. After three drinks, it was fun. Word of advice - next year DO NOT go to this event. Lame-O.

Bah Humbug.