Cheers

How Mr. Lit Up Our Date Night as A Recreation From 35 Years Ago

Shelley

To me, the lights of the season here in our quaint town of Chippewa Falls, WI, are magical. It’s been years since Mr. and I have gone to Irvine Park to drive through. Mr. asked me about my prompts for the week. I said, “One of them is Red/Green.” So, granting my wishes to find some red/green to photograph, he arranged for a date night this past Friday.

He planned dinner at our favorite happy hour spot to grab a glass of wine and a couple of appetizers, followed by a walk-through of our famous Christmas Village in Irvine Park. (Here’s a link to the park’s website.) The park’s history is as heart-warming as seeing the sites in person. The family who donated it originally mandated that it would always be free to every person who visits it. The park is run and sustained on donations only.

After dinner, we jumped in the car and I smiled seeing the street lights and the welcoming way the town transformed at night to guide us to the park.

The week before, the streets were packed for the annual Christmas parade. I’ve heard it was record attendance. As we drove down the street I remembered the bitter cold winter when Mr. and I and our tiny 1st born baby were in the parade one year as Mary, Joseph, and swaddling infant. 🥶…it was COLD. Thinking back to that time in life is a blur for me.

I remember that we looked like Frosty the Snowman in warp speed on the float. It was hard to recognize who we were meant to be because we all were so bundled up.

I hadn’t walked through the park at this time of year since December 2017. That year, my youngest and I went on an adventure for me to catch some fun winter photos. Our Chamber of Commerce shared my post too, here’s a link to that post.

As Mr. and I rounded the corner to the park, we saw that we weren’t the only ones with the great idea to walk through the park on a Friday night. Go figure!

It was unseasonably warm for WI, in the upper 40s, so the parking lot was full. The car and walker traffic in/out of the park was steady.

The young families with strollers filled with tiny bundled-up babies and other families with kids running around made it busier than I imagined for a magical date-night moment. We used to make it a yearly ritual to drive through with our kiddos after Christmas Eve mass. I smiled at the magical lights and how popular this spectacular park had grown since the last time I visited it.

Wow, they’re in the 36th year. I remember when I was 23 and heard about the new Christmas Village in 1987. It was a date-night event for Mr. and I when we got engaged the next year at Christmas. . . wow, again, that was 35 years ago.

This year, there were plenty of Red/Green lights to see. More than I remember from back in 1988.

And a vintage car was driving through too, score! If you remember, I shoot my camera in manual mode. So, I wasn’t quite ready to get a great photo, but it was still fun to see. Even if it looked a bit like Stephen King’s Christine. 🧐🤔

We walked up to cross the bridge to the other side of the park. We let the families pass us by.

The red/green lights I hoped to see didn’t disappoint me despite the crowds of people passing by. I did make an attempt or two at getting photos of the lights.

The famous bridge’s arch sign with the Irvine Park name has been up for the Christmas Village each year for as long as I can remember.

It was extra busy on the other side of the bridge. We simply walked and enjoyed looking at the lights. I didn’t take any photos until we started our return to the car.

I paused in the break in the crowd and told Mr., “Wait, I want to try one more attempt at a close-up of the red and green lights.”

Christmas music filled the air (along with the kiddos yelling, screaming, talking, and enjoying the place). It made me sad to see one young, possibly single mom, with four rambunctious kids, yelling at them the whole time. What fun is that for the kids? I hope they did enjoy their time there. We enjoyed it much more when we weren’t following them after they had gone off in a different direction.

I always wonder where the volunteers put all the strings of lights when they take the 60,000 + of them down. I also wonder where they store the wooden figures, etc. It’s a miracle how they pull off this magical Christmas Village every year.

As we neared the end of our walk through the park, I turned around and took a couple more photos. To me, winter/night photography is hard compared to daylight. But, our date night was magical to me to see the glow of the red/green lights and the people of our quaint little town out enjoying the lights of the season.

Post Inspiration: Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “To me.” Find a way to use the phrase “to me” in your post. Use it any way you’d like. Enjoy! Terri Webster Schrandt’s Sunday Stills Dec 10 Monthly Color Challenge: RED and GREEN and Anne-Christine for Lens-Artists #278 Magical.

PS – My Monday posting of this post was interrupted by a failed Microsoft Update that froze my computer for a day. Mr. performed a miracle so that I didn’t have to put a new computer on my Christmas wish list! What do you find magical at this time of year? Are you a red or a green light fan? Or maybe a different color? What do you like about night photography? Have you visited a place 35 years later?

Published by Shelley

Letting my quirk out one post at a time.

41 thoughts on “How Mr. Lit Up Our Date Night as A Recreation From 35 Years Ago”

  1. Well Shelley the most magical thing about your post (to me) is that you and the Mr obviously adore each other after all these years! I love that he asks what the prompts are and then engineers a date night to help you make your photographs. Wishing you many more years of magical moments and a lovely holiday season.

    1. Aw, thank you, Tina. We do think we’re lucky to have found each other and have stuck together all these years. 😍💖🥳

  2. That’s a very special Mr. you have there. And what a beautiful park, all lit up like that. I guess there’s always that ONE mother who can’t let her kids just enjoy themselves. So in manual mode…were you using a tripod? It’s so hard at night…especially in the cold, but I guess 40s isn’t so cold!

    1. Thanks, Dawn, yes, he’s a keeper.
      I agree, there’s always at least one frustrated parent in big crowds. The kids were just so excited and wanted to wear off their energy and she wasn’t having any of it.
      No I didn’t use a tripod. That is a tool I’d like to figure out how to use better. I pull it out once a year for family photos. I shoot in manual mode all the time so all I do is adjust the ISO and the white balance and hope the photos turn out. The year that I went with my daughter there was snow and it was colder, the camera did okay – I just had to let it slowly get cold and slowly warm up. Yeah, 40s isn’t too cold, I guess my gloved hands kept the camera warm too. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤔

  3. I love your photos and thoughts, Shelley, great post! The park and the town look very nice. They remind me of my hometown in Michigan. A MacBook would work better for you, just a thought. I haven’t used a Windows machine in several years.

    1. Thank you, John! Yes, we’re a lot like your hometown in Michigan.
      I use a PC since I share a monitor with my work computer and the same desk. Some day, maybe I’d branch out into the Mac world. For now, everything is Windows 😏🤔

  4. That single mom with four kids has quite possibly been pushed to the edge.

    Didn’t realize you were in Chippewa Falls. I spent one week in December in Marshfield, which doesn’t look far from there. Great part of the country…

    1. Yes, she was on the edge for sure. Her idle threats and attempting to carry the most challenging child back to the car with the other three following along didn’t work.

      Yes, been here in CF for 35 years, my hubby his whole life. He worked with Seymour Cray at Cray Research too. Yes, Marshfield isn’t that far and is a nice town to visit too.

      1. Cray, as in Cray Computers?

        One Christmas, I ordered a bunch of knitting books for Mary from Schoolhouse Press. I forget what town they’re in, but it wasn’t far from Mashfield, because when they arrived, they were wrapped in the Marshfield newspaper, where I had just been…

  5. I liked the photos, Shelley and I’m glad the Mr was able to put your computer back from the edge. We don’t decorate much, just some white lights on a small evergreen in the yard. I like night photography, but some of my most interesting pictures are the result of forgetting that I had left those settings in place the next day.

    1. Thanks, Dan. Yeah, I was mighty thankful that his unplugging it, moving it to another room, replugging it in, and rebooting cured the problem. 😆😏🤔
      We decorate less and less each year, except for this year, I pulled out some of my mom’s vintage stuff and I can’t wait to see if our daughter’s want the items to take home with them for their decorations. Shh…don’t tell them!
      That’s funny about the camera settings, I’ll have to try that and see what I get.

  6. What a fun post to read and to see all the holiday lights, Shelley! How cool to have this be such a long-standing tradition and that you and Mister have enjoyed it through the years. Temps in the 40s is a warm night for me nowadays, (which we are experiencing). We missed our small tree lighting last weekend due to black ice on the rural highway. There are a few areas in Spokane that have great neighborhood displays, but it’s too far to drive in winter conditions. But I will share what festive surprise rolled down our street last weekend 🙂 Have a great week!

    1. Thanks, Terri, I’m glad you enjoyed the lights. It’s a fun tradition at this time of year. We missed it for several and were pleasantly surprised at how it had grown over the years.
      Yes, 40s is nice. We’ve been back down in the low 20s and windy, we wouldn’t have ventured to the park to walk through it, but we can drive through so that’s nice. We stay home when the roads are icy too!!!!
      I look forward to your festive post. 💖😁

  9. Shelley, this looks like a really enjoyable night and something to not only reminisce about, but walk through to get into the festive season. I like how you did the moving photos and how you got up close to the lights. The twinkling lights in the night sky were perfect, not just for this post, but your prior post as well, where the gazebo looked magical with all the lights. I only took night shots once – our tour group was in Denmark on a tour and it was Midsummer and the celebration of the Summer Solstice. We walked around Tivoli Gardens and our hotel was across the street, so it was a better view of the fireworks and the bright lights from the hotel room. Unfortunately my pics would not have the same appeal as what I saw with my eyes.

    Then, a few years ago, I visited an old cemetery in Wyandotte. The cemetery was established in 1865 to bury some of military personnel who were killed in the Civil War. As a teenager, I took an art class at the City where we went to various places and did charcoal sketchings. In this case, we went to the cemetery and did some tracings of the actual tombstones plus sketches of the cemetery. I returned there a few years ago to take pics. It is maintained by volunteers now, but it looked pretty bad that day as tombstones had fallen over and the grass needed to be cut and trimmed around those tombstones. A huge rambling rosebush was near the entrance – just beautiful.

    1. Thank you, Linda, I appreciate your feedback and your stories of what you’ve seen. I’ve never been to Europe and enjoy hearing about places that others have seen and what stood out to them.
      That’s so cool that your art class took you places around the city. Have you saved any of those charcoal sketches? Tombstones are fascinating to draw, take photos of, and to admire for how they last or attract lichen. We had to pay extra for the service of the tombstone company we bought my mom’s from so that they routinely go and check to relevel it. The rose bush sounds beautiful. Sometimes just letting it grow creates an even more attractive bush.

      1. That was a fabulous night for fireworks and colorful skies Shelley – too bad I had no great shots to remember it by and the glare from the hotel window was also problematic. I don’t have any sketches or tracings from that class. It would have been fifty-five years ago now, but I wish I had kept them (or my mom would have). I wrote the post back in 2018 after visiting Oakwood Cemetery. There is another graveyard I wrote about that is also very old and was in some disrepair, with tombstones cracked in half. I remember one gravemarker for a little boy that said simply “Here lies Little Willy.”

        1. Aw, it’s nice though that you have such vivid memories. Sometimes those are just as special as having a photo of it. You’re able to articulate well what you see when you don’t have a picture, that’s a gift!
          Aw…that’s sweet and sad at the same time.

  10. There is nothing like small town America to bring festivities and magic to the holidays. What a great date night. And nice that he is interested in your photo challenges. I also wonder where all the stuff gets placed during the off-season. Anyway you definitely grabbed some good red and green bulbs and you brought us all some twinkling magic. Thanks Shelley.

    1. Thank you, Donna! It was a magical date.
      On a sad, turned happy, note, yesterday morning some mad woman drove into the fences and some of the scenes I pictured in my photos and also smashed into the park employee’s truck multiple times. She was arrested shortly after that and by 3 pm the crew had reset everything and repaired the damage so that the horse drawn sleigh could pull guests through the park without delay or even noticing there was damage. The magic of small town spirit came to the rescue. 😍🤗

      1. That is the best story… at least a happy ending. It doesn’t sound like anyone was hurt, thank goodness. I don’t understand people sometimes.

  11. As always your Mr. is so sweet! I enjoyed strolling with you through the displays! Congratulations on 35 years. We marked our 35 this year too. High five!! 😀

    1. Yes, he is. Thank you for strolling with us. 👋🏻👏🏻 Congratulations to you two too! Happy Anniversary 😍
      PS – have you gotten your photo library issues worked out? I’ve been noticing weird things when I visit certain blogs that have been using the gallery options for displaying photos. Comments aren’t working properly and I’m not able to scroll through the photos. Some people are saying that they have to get new Themes to fix the problem. Dang computers!

      1. The photo library problem has been going on for years and I’ve tried several times to fix it myself and get input from WP help. It’s more of a problem with getting the photos into the post, not after it’s been published. In my case I don’t think the theme has any influence. Unfortunately I think I might have to use another source to store my photos and import them.

        1. Dang, that’s so frustrating. It sounds like you’ve found the solution you’ll pursue. A lot of bloggers have been having issues, so it’s the season to reconsider and adjust I guess. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤔🤗

  12. I’ve always thought Christmas lights are magical and your photos are wonderful. I loved that your Mr asks about your prompts for the week! No such luck around here 😀

    1. Thank you, Sofia. Yes, Mr knows how much fun I have so encourages me. It also keeps me busy so I’m not creating extra jobs for him to do around here. 😆
      I adore your take on the prompt. Your words of wisdom and the photos you shared were exquisite!

  13. Shelley – congrats to you two finding each other and still going on a date after all those years! And how great of him to help you finding what you needed for the prompt! Magical lights – but to me the most magical thing is you two together making a good life!

    1. Thank you, Anne-Christine! We’re happy to keep on counting the years together. It’s magical to be alive and still doing things together. 🥰

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