Annual Trek to The Christmas Loft

This past weekend...  a holiday weekend with an absurd amount of traffic and gridlock due to leaf peeping tourism...  we made our annual trek to The Christmas Loft with Lukey and Kenzie.  We headed northward earlier than most people were out and about so, for the most part, we stayed ahead of the crowds.  

The scenery was typical autumn scenery...  like we are in an artificial Willy Wonka world of funky, overly fiery assortments of brightly saturated colors that appear more like infrared photography or false-color photography or someone's nightmare than real life.  To be honest, I prefer the late spring season for more awe-inspiring scenery.  Autumn looks a bit too wildly psychedelic for me (should be more appropriately spelled "psycho-delic" if you ask me).  Springtime after everything begins to bloom looks more natural and colorful.  Springtime colors are in distinct shades of light green to dark green with pastel shades of reds, oranges and yellows, complemented and highlighted by flowering plants.  Autumn simply looks like Mother Nature decided to try LSD or mushrooms and she is now tripping out.  I definitely prefer the more natural pastel shades of colors blooming in springtime among all the shades of green as new growth hides all the dreary brown landscape.  Regardless, the drive northward on this autumn day was nice...  not necessarily because of the colors but mostly because of light traffic, clear skies and excited kids in the back seat looking forward to The Christmas Loft.

We easily arrived at The Christmas Loft shortly after they opened which meant we were ahead of the holiday crowds.  Typically, we make this annual trek to The Christmas Loft in September before most people are even thinking about Christmas.  By the Columbus Day holiday weekend, the store gets a lot of traffic so our plan on this day was to arrive early and then get out of there in time to get to a restaurant for lunch before everyone else decided to do the same.  

Now, inside The Christmas Loft's Christmas village environment...

There is a lot to see in this little Christmas village in the center of the store and the kids are always on the lookout for new things...

The store itself is made up of about a dozen or more rooms surrounding the perimeter of the Christmas village.  Each of these rooms has a theme.  Here, below, the kids are in a small room tailored toward stockings...

Lukey is politely saying hello to the life-sized and lifelike Santa (why take a chance in snubbing him, right?  It is too close to Christmas at this point!)...

Sheila and I do have an ulterior motive to this annual shopping day at The Christmas Loft...  well, of course, we do enjoy spending a day with the kids but we also carefully watch to see what captures their interest to help guide us in shopping for Christmas gifts for them...  

Here, some snow-globe night lights captured Lukey's attention...

These night lights have a small blower inside them to continuously keep the snow swirling inside...

Kenzie... impatiently leading the way...  I think she would run through the entire store in five minutes if we didn't slow her down a bit...

She did stop on her own to check out the beaded garland...

Lukey excitedly chose a Boston Bruins hockey figurine ornament to buy on this visit...  which came as no surprise to any of us...

Now we are in the toy room...

...to the room with displays of Christmas village buildings and figurines.  Here, Kenzie is trying out the "Try Me" switches that light and animate each village...

The upside-down Christmas tree always needs to be viewed, yes, upside-down...

I have to say that there is a lot more room under this upside-down Christmas tree for presents!

A couple more snow globe scenes with motors perpetually blowing the snow...

This snow globe lantern was nice...

This nativity set always captures Kenzie's attention and she always expresses that she wants it...  Joseph stands about two feet tall...  the four piece set costs a bit more than Kenzie's allowance can support.  Putting price aside, realistically, Kenzie has no room for this large set anyway!

This beater-riding elf was helping out in the bakery of the big Christmas Village and the kids thought this was funny...

Here, below, Gee is showing Lukey and Kenzie a stuffed bear cub ottoman...  

After our morning at The Christmas Loft, we headed to lunch.  Lunch was good but the noteworthy thing about lunch was that this was the first time in a very long time that Lukey strayed from chicken tenders and shockingly ordered a steak from the Kid's Menu!  

Kenzie shot this rare photo of Lukey and me...

We all had a really nice day!  And, Gee and I got a few ideas for Christmas gifts...