A Couple of Cool Sights Over the Holidays

The day before Christmas (otherwise known as Christmas Eve of course)...

Our ward has always delivered two luminaries to each house in the neighborhood to be lit on Christmas Eve. They are a very simple light - a white lunch bag, a couple of handfuls of rock salt, and a votive candle. But when the whole neighborhood lights them, it is a very surreal sight and creates a profound sense of peace that adds to the spirit of Christmas Eve like you wouldn't believe. The pictures aren't great (we need to spend a little time figuring out some of the more advanced settings on our camera) but in real life it is amazing.

This year, however, the ward did not provide the luminaries. Bruce and I couldn't imagine not having them so he got the supplies on Christmas Eve (for 10) and we put 5 in front of our house and 5 in front of the house across the street. Fortunately for us, all the other houses on our street are in a different ward - only in Utah - so we still got pretty much the full effect.






The day after Christmas...

Bruce happened to look out our bedroom window and saw this...











Moments later we saw this from the front porch...








It turned out that a group of balloonists from a town about 30 minutes south of here, decided to go joy-riding and ended up in our neighborhood. In fact, one balloon landed on our street. They even were letting neighborhood kids go up for a quick ride while the balloons were tethered to the ground.


And this is as close as any of our kids got. The others were cowering in the van. Spencer refused to go up because he has recently developed a fear of heights and Matthew was freaked out by the sound of the burner that heats the air. And Emmarsyn, well given her level of understanding, I think she was just making a wise decision. There isn't much in her experience that would lead her to conclude that going up in a giant floating balloon would be a wise idea. As far as she knows, floating balloons either pop and disappear with no advance warning or they simply float away getting smaller and smaller until they too disappear. So really I have to commend her on reasoning abilities. I was hoping we could get past the boys' issues, but no amount of reassurances would get them in that basket. Oh well, things like this happen all the time, right?