Christmas Traditions part 3

Christmas lights are the best part of the season. They are definately Emma's favorite part. She loves the lights on her Christmas tree in her room, and has to have them on every night. While I don't rush to do this each year anymore because I abhor crowds (we get around to it before the holiday), I always loved going to Temple Square with my family to see the lights when they first turned them on. Back then they used much better colors than now. Now there is too much pink and yellow. I don't think of pink as a very Christmasy color. My favorite spot was a huge pine tree that still stands just inside the east entrance. They would completely drown this tree in red lights. I would stand as close to the trunk as I could get and just stare straight up. All I could see were thousands of red sparkling lights. Beautiful. When they still decorate this tree (they don't do it every year for some reason) I still love standing under it and looking up. In that one gaze upwards all my warm holiday memories come flying back to me, and in that one moment all is right with the world.

After seeing the lights there we would cross the street to the mall and get hot chocolate at the McDonalds which was just inside. Then we'd all pile back into our car and drive around to look at some of the better Christmas lights on houses. This was back when it was almost universally thought that colored lights are better than white ones, so there was tons of color everywhere. I still prefer colored lights to white, but each year there are fewer and fewer people who agree with me. Just a few streets away from my parents house are two streets that were always fabulous to see at Christmas time. One was called Christmas Street and the other Bible Street. Of course these were just adopted names for the season. Christmas Street was a dead end street where every house was decorated really well with lights. They would often have lights stringing from one house to the next, so the lights never ended. On Bible Street they had big picture boards along with exerps from Luke of the nativity story. You could drive along and read the scriptures and view the pictures. Both these streets still do this, and we take Emma each year.