Date Night, Christmas Lights!

One of our favorite dates each year is the Christmas lights date! We rarely do it the same way twice, but I never care - as long as lights are involved!

When we lived in Marion, the city park had a truly fabulous light display that people would come from all over to see. (They still have it...we just don't get back over that way very often.) Our city park here also has a light display and it's really nice, but it's just not quite as big as Marion's.

There's also the We Care display, which was featured last year on ABC's Great Light Fight, but it can be a very hectic place to get through, since it's actually set up in a residential neighborhood. When we decided to go out on a Christmas light date last Friday night, it was a little too cold to walk the lights, and we didn't feel like sitting in the car forever, so we skipped the We Care park.

We did go to the main park, though, and once we pulled over and let the tailgater go by, we had a delightful time!

There's a beautiful, old, historic neighborhood in town with big houses that are all character-laden, and I'd noticed while driving by one evening that some had really pretty light displays. So I asked Ryan to drive us through that. I didn't take any pictures, because it felt a bit stalkerish to creep through a neighborhood taking pictures of houses after dark. But oh so pretty.

And you know what? My two favorite houses actually didn't have traditional lights on them. They had beautiful wreaths and greenery displays on the windows and entrances and regular lights illuminating those areas. So majestic looking!

We wandered toward downtown and happened to drive past the Seiberling Mansion, which I've blogged about before. It's this huge, historic home in town that always gets decorated to the max at Christmas. A few nights throughout December, different businesses will sponsor the admission for the evening and people can come through for free. We hadn't checked the schedule to see when the free nights were, but there were a ton of cars parked there when we went by. I pulled up Facebook to check, and sure enough! It was a free night! So even though it hadn't been in our plans, we parked and went through the mansion.

The themes are different every year, but this year seemed to have more of a traditional spin on it and I think these were some of my favorite displays yet!

 His form kind of reminded me of mine...in no way.

 We decided the carolers must not have checked the forecast before going out to sing. The little one is almost buried in snow!

 It's hard to take a quick selfie when surrounded by people in a very tiny room. Not our best work, but proof that we were there!

The third floor of the house is this huge ballroom with trees that are normally the same (or at least very similar) every year. That includes the Santa tree, the upside down tree, and the patriotic trees. AND my favorite: the village!

I think this was my favorite tree of the whole place:

And this was Ryan's:

We had a great evening looking at the lights and made it home in time to relax and watch a movie before our super busy day on Saturday!