In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!