Theme Park Christmas, Sea World Style

As usual, we are on a quest to visit as many theme parks during December as possible. At the risk of not decorating our house … uh, wait, Tony put it on our calendar for the morning of 12/12. Our neighbors put up outside lights the day after Thanksgiving, and I noticed Tony digging stuff out of the attic late one night this past week and the next morning, there was a small showing of Christmas decorations outside our house.  Likely related, yes?

I’m actually OK with keeping things smaller this year. It seems like every year electricity gets more expensive and I feel more grinch-like when it comes time to pay that particular bill and threaten to put our blow-ups on a hanger instead of blowing them up, because those things are cute when they’re up, at night, but they spend most of the day in a deflated pancake state, which is just sad for the exorbitant prices of purchase and blowing. (And why does all that sound like an awful euphemism?)

Now there’s an invention for someone to make… a hanger for blow-up decorations! I envision it being something like a foldaway shepherd’s hook with arms or something. I don’t know, I’m not an inventor, YOU ARE!

ANYWAY, theme parks. Yes, back to that. This past weekend, we went to Sea World and celebrated my mom’s birthday there with her. Their Santa was actually decent this year and we were able to get some good pictures! We love their Pets Rule show, and particularly the cat portion of the show (I know, big surprise there!). I wish we could train our cats to do some of those tricks, seems the only trick we can get them to do consistently is to actually poop in their litter box. If only we could teach them to barf in their litter box or even on the tile entryway would be OK, instead of on the rug (soft surface and all that).

We intended to stay for the tree lighting ceremony, which is the BEST tree lighting ceremony I’ve ever seen. Just the right amount of time and lots of audience participation. Then, in a feat of Tony’s stubbornness persistence we decided to wait the two hours to see Santa again (we had seen him at breakfast, but this time it was in his cottage), because they had pagers instead of a long line. Santa visits have gone high tech! While we waited, we could go visit the reindeer (caribou) and William wanted to serenade them in a failed attempt to have them come over so he could pet them. But he had a great time singing them Christmas carols! And, we were allowed to sit in Santa’s sleigh for a photo op.

It was an all-around good day!