One of our favorite Christmas traditions is to drive around town and look at Christmas lights. Our area hosts some amazing displays of creative festivity. Each year more and more houses join in and partake of light decorations. Normally my husband will drive while I am on camera duty (my favorite job to have 🙂 ).

This year was particularly interesting. For one thing, the little one was big enough to realize there were lights. He was quite fascinated with the displays. However, he fell asleep part way through. About the time he fell asleep, two people came out of the house we were watching. This particular place had music timed to their light display. They were approaching a lot of the cars that were parked along the road, and appeared to be asking for donations. They bypassed our car though, so I am unsure what they were asking for. Another thing was that we ended up getting somewhat lost on our way to one of the big displays. We missed the turn. However, there was a car right behind us so we couldn’t turn around. We ended up at a dead end at the end of a dirt road with multiple cars behind us (apparently they thought we knew where we were going). My husband had to maneuver the car around a large pit and do a 3 point turn. We then had to get around the other cars that were waiting to do their turn arounds as well. However, the challenges were well worth it to see some amazing displays.

A challenge for photographing such a tradition is two-fold. One, the car is continually moving. A lot of the residences with large displays had signs that said “No Parking.” It is probably due to the bottleneck situations that have happened in years past. Another problem was that it was so dark. I wasn’t able to get out my nice camera, so I was relegated to my new phone. It wasn’t bad all things considered. However, next year I would like to research ahead of time and see if there are any tricks I can use to get better pictures of the lights.

Even if the pictures didn’t turn out, we still had a great time driving around looking at all the displays. I hope you and your loved ones get to celebrate your own traditions this year!

-Amanda