John returned to Knoxville early this evening (after Thanksgiving with his family in Tuscaloosa) just in time to head downtown for our traditional Christmas kickoff -Christmas in the City. Christmas in the City is an annual event when the mayor turns on Knoxville’s holiday lights and activities such as Christmas carole singing and marshmellow roasting take place. We love this event! We were a bit late for the official lighting but had a great time walking around and people watching!
Market Square Mall’s official Christmas tree is quite impressive with thousands of twinkling lights, ribbons and shiny balls.
The city sets up and maintains an outdoor skating rink during the holidays. Not exactly Rockefeller Center but impressive in it’s own right, especially when the temperature in Knoxville can get into the mid 60’s during the holidays. But it was not mid 60’s on this chilly night, more like low 30’s. This is me watching the skaters go round and round!
John enjoyed watching the skaters too. We briefly talked about giving it a whirl but there were many people crashing on the ice and we figured, why add to the pile up by being out there ourselves.
We did take advantage of the free horse drawn carriage rides. We had lots of fun circling a city block, listening to the clomp, clomp, clomp of horses hooves and looking at the many lights in the city. The arch leading into Krutch Park is lit up behind us.
The city had numerous horses and buggies enlisted so the wait was not too bad but people continued to ride for hours. I bet the horses were pretty happy when it was time to go home!
Tomorrow night….Christmas lights in Gatlinburg!
