Luminaria December 24, 2018 @goldenoakfarm
Our town has had a town wide luminaria celebration for 38 years. It’s always held the Sunday before Christmas Eve. Some years have been really good and some just plain poor. There’s been more of the latter in the last decade, unfortunately. But not this year!
When my son was in Cub Scouts one of their fund raising projects was to create the milk bottle luminarias. My guess is they did this again this year because there were the green stamped bottles everywhere we went.
People also used canning jars, one house had small pewter colored lanterns, and lots of people used many types of paper bags. One alternated paper bags with canning jars and that looked really nice.
The lighting displays were much nicer this year. The trend in past years has been to the shaped things in white lights. Boring!
This year many more houses had colored lights and more of them had taken the time to put them up nicely. So we drove on all the main streets, sometimes twice on the good ones, for an hour. I play Christmas music, with vocals, while we ride, the only time my husband tolerates it. :))
We left about 5:45PM and decided to start at the north end of town. As we came down the first road, heading east, the full moon was just rising. It was a deep golden orange and just enormous! We could see it from almost everywhere in town and it was a superb counterpoint to all the lights.
I had saved hundreds of milk cartons from back when we bought store bough milk, to make into luminaria, but have never gotten the job done. Our driveway is 1/8 mile to the house so it will take a LOT of them to line both sides. I hope this year to get that project finished, but I say that every year, for going on 2 decades…
I’ve also collected many hundreds of votive and tea lights from tag sales, in case I ever finish the project…
Source: Luminaria: http://www.townofhatfield.org/Pages/index
