best night of her life

Rachel declared last night, "The best night of my LIFE!"  In 6.5 years, that means it ranked first out of approximately 2,372 nights.  Wow!

So aren't you dying to know what made it the best night of her life?

We went to the tree lighting ceremony at a local shopping center.

I know, it doesn't sound very exciting, but we had heard from quite a few people that it was really neat, so we decided to give it a try, since it wasn't too terribly cold and it was a weekend, and it started at 6:00, which wasn't too late for our girls.

We had to wait outside for about a half hour to save our space on the parade route (there's a Christmas parade beforehand--Santa comes in at the end of the parade on a horse drawn carriage and goes up to the tree to do the lighting, and then he's there for the rest of the Christmas season to allow thousands of children to sit on his knee and tell him what they want for Christmas.

Here we are waiting for it to get dark and for the parade to start.

I didn't get many pictures of the whole event.  I only took my little camera, and the battery was practically dead, and the pictures were taking VERY slowly.  I was lucky to get anything.

Rebecca watching the parade

One of the characters in the parade

Rachel jumped and squealed with glee.  She LOVED it all.  Rebecca didn't quite know what was going on, but she liked it.

When Santa lit the big tree there were fireworks.  I couldn't get any good pictures of it because of the timing issue with my camera, but here's what I got.  You can kind of see the fireworks on the left, just starting to go up into the sky.

Rachel was squealing with excitement during the fireworks.  It was worth the hassle (and it wasn't a huge hassle, but a little one, fighting traffic, waiting out in the cold, dealing with Rebecca's fussiness because she wanted out of her stroller the whole night....) just to see Rachel so excited.

On the way out to our car she declared it the best night of her life.  Guess we didn't have to take her to Disney World a few years ago and see the fireworks there over Cinderella's castle.  We'll just take her down the street to the shopping center every year from now on!