Fun Old-Fashioned Family Pre-Christmas Events, 1

Cary has a number of interesting Christmas-time traditions and celebrations. Last year I documented the very considerable downtown Cary Christmas decor. This year we visited the North Carolina Festival of Lanterns, held annually in Cary, a few pix from which appear below. Also documented in this and the next post are a number of other events in the run-up to the traditional fun old-fashioned Sherouse family Christmas, which we enjoyed yet again this year at Rebecca and Jeremy's house in Cary. 

The festivities began with Penelope's appearance in Young Sherlock;
theater and stagecraft are now her favorite extra-curricular activities

A Raleigh tradition is Christmas at the Angus Barn restaurant

Imagine room after room of such Christmas decor; the food, mostly
steak, was good too

P at her Jazz Dance expo

Christmas decor at our apartment (thanks, Marie)

On December 21st, P and I baked brownies, hoping to offer a Stonehenge
replica for the Solstice; though tasty, the brownies were architecturally
unsound, and I later characterized our creation as a replica of Stonehenge,
1940, after the Stukas had bombed...

Auntie Rachel arrived from DC and we all toured the North Carolina
Festival of Lanterns

It's an extensive and visually stunning take on the Chinese lantern festival,
a very old festival of light, a tradition in most religions...this of course is
a very 21st century version in materials and exterior illumination...

Still pretty stunning...brought to us by Tianyu Arts and Culture, Inc.

Excellent signage; and in English too, although most visitors,
including yours truly, are pretty completely ignorant of the
relevant Chinese characters, myth, legends, etc.

Absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, nor even Chinese New
Year...

Stage performances too

Rudolph? Bambi?

Santa? Gandalf?

Disney princesses? Rhinemaidens?

The Dragon Ship that later (in January) was sunk by a windstorm,
shutting the whole show down a few days prematurely; Divine Wind

One wonders whether they will do similar shows in Taiwan