Our Evening in Gruene, TX

Saturday evening, Dec. 2, was when the City of Gruene had their town Christmas Lighting. I have to admit the lights were not quite as spectacular as I thought they would be, but, the shopping was 100% better!!!

They were also having their "Market Days", which are normally the 3rd weekend of the month, but we didn't have time to even look around at all of that. But...the very first shop we went into had these marvelous ceramic sculptures by Sandy Coulter of 'Full of Spirit Creations'. They were all so beautiful! And the red one was screaming out to me, "I am yours! I was made for you!". It was one of the bigger sculptures, and I just couldn't buy it right now with Christmas coming up. I'm just praying it will still be there in January. I was able to afford one of her smaller sculptures...and it was even my second favorite, so I didn't feel like I was settling. The picture doesn't do it justice, but here it is anyway.



By the time we got out of that shop, I had about 2 minutes to zoom through an antique shop-real, live, 100+ year old antiques-with some very cool and beautiful things!

By then, we had to run on down to town center to see the lighting. Then we had to wait for Cowboy Kringle to get there. A local Santa, I suppose, riding on a horse. The kids (Ethan and Claire) thought he was great. He finally hitched up his horse, made his proclimation, did the countdown and voila! The Christmas lights all came on! Got this shot of Claire on Steven's shoulders.


Then, everybody in town made a beeline for The Grist Mill restaurant! That place is great! Of course, the perfect weather didn't hurt...but there is a HUGE park size waiting area outside, that is lighted and fenced, so if you are keeping an eye on your kids at all, you can't lose them. We had to wait an hour but it was no problem. Ethan, as usual, made friends with two other boys and ran around the whole time, and Allison and Claire just kept themselves entertained with different things.

And the food! It was all so good, and the Chocolate Sundaes the kids got for dessert were, I think, actually Chocolate Sunday, Monday and Tuesdays! Huge freakin' big! I think they only ate about a third of them.


From there we walked around town a little bit. We went into the General Store, but it wasn't anything real special. However, across the street is an "antique" store...but mostly a "vintage store". Anyway, they had some wonderful things! And I only got through about 1/8 of it before they kicked us out so they could close! lol! I did buy 3 things, though...one was this vintage Vera Christmas tablecloth.



Another was this vintage Christmas apron. They had several, but I love this one. Now I'm going to have to come up with a Christmas outfit to match it!


And this is my favorite thing of all! These little nesting owls! I thought there would be 3 in there, but they just kept on going and going...the tiniest one is sooo cute!



I'll leave you with this picture of the whole family that this nice drunk lady took. She was nice enough, but, she wouldn't wait for anyone to get settled, and we were all on the far right edge with part of Ethan's face chopped off, and some other girl in a very plump pink coat like I had in 1972 was the whole rest of the picture! Thank goodness for editing! lol!