Saturday was the Santa Clause parade! That marks the beginning of Christmas and a good time to put up the tree (and I have a good argument to say its not too early as many may argue!!). So Saturday morning I put up the tree!
I love my tree! My ornaments are almost all individually purchased from Pier 1, the Christmas Store in Stratford (a couple of my favs!), and Bowring (and Zellers and the Dollar store... you can get some nice ones there too!).
This made me very excited... I always wanted to have the tree that's at the front window of the house! And this year I have it! Extra reason to put the lights on at night to get everyone in the festive spirit (Christmas lights to go up on the house soon! ... Just have to take the Halloween decorations down first! Ha!)
Our original plan for the parade was to go with my 3 year old niece, but those plans fell through, and we ended up going with Paul and the 2 adorable Brown girls. We planned to meet downtown for 5:30pm, got coffees and ended up finding a spot on Dundas in front of the JLC (right at the end of the parade). Before the parade began, the security man told us that the parade wouldn't make its way down to where we were until about 6:30-6:45. We dreaded that one hour wait since it was chilly (frozen toes!) and the girls were struggling with being in one place for such a long time! At about 6:45, Aleksy and I decided to make it our mission to find a public washroom to use and we noticed that the parade was about 3 blocks down down where we were standing! Good news.... But then those police lights stayed in the same place for another hour!! Longest wait in the cold of my life!!!
The parade finally got to us about 8pm. I still loved it, but I did want it to go a little faster since it was late, cold, the poor little gals were beginning to fuss, and I had started preparing supper, which I wasn't going to want to eat at 9:30pm (which we didn't end up eating!).
The gals: we first tried without the stroller but quickly learned that standing still for a long period of time is difficult for little ones so the stroller was necessary! Naalia's hiding in the back! Protected from the wind!
Serena keeping herself occupied by taking my hat, putting it on, dropping it to the ground... repeat... But she looked adorable in the hat so I did my best to catch a photo!
Aleksy, Serena & Paul waiting for the parade... and waiting... and waiting!!!
Here's a couple pictures of the floats. Considering they were talking a lot about the cuts and lack of sponsors, I found the floats to be good. I did notice that they weren't handing out candy (which could be because by the time the parade got to us, they didn't have any) which was always the best part as a kid! The first of these floats is the grinch and the second a train (the express!). The Shriners did quite a lot for the parade this year, which was nice - love bugs, floats, among other things! I did notice that there were a couple of marching bands from outside of London (Burlington & Collingwood). Although it was a super long wait, I still did enjoy the floats, bands, men on stilts, animals, dancing girls, and baton swinging girls!
And Santa came!! He'll be back in under 6 weeks!! Yay Christmas!!
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