I happen to see that it was my pal’s 25th wedding anniversary on Facebook (I gave her a thumb’s up) and clicked through to her sister’s wall. Her sister was up from the south visiting and went to the National Christmas Center and a photo she showed piqued my interested in going to a place we have passed dozens of time going to the Lancaster, PA area. It’s right in Paradise, about 20 miles from here. We had until this Sunday to go as they would have weird hours until this Christmas.

Ma, you going bye byes again?

Brian was off (unfortunately, his hours have been cut at the store), so I had even mapped out a few geocaches in the area-most were those ‘lifting the skirt’ kind, but we just couldn’t find one in a tree on a short road. We stopped at a thrift store where I had consigned things in 2011. They were having a sale, but we didn’t linger. I got an adorable  gingerbread man wreath for $2.50.

The center was a lot bigger than we thought. We read that the owner started out with 3 displays and grew to 10 or so.

This guy greeted us, though he looks a bit frumpy.

This is perfectly decorated.

We took over 100 photos!

The Norwegians use to wrap their trees with cotton batting to make it look like snow!

The Woolworth store display! This is the photo Olivia’s sister showed on her page.

This was the German Santa, the ultimate ‘toy maker’ The room had a number of wax Santas-they looked so real! I didn’t care for the children or the elves-creepy!

This was part of Tudor Towne, an animated story with different animals/creatures telling the story about how they almost didn’t have Christmas. We took Sean to his display, but in Delaware when he was a little boy!

There was a display about the time Jesus was born, down to cobblestones…most of it was very dark, but this was very beautifully done

Here’s Virginia, the little girl who wrote a letter about the existence of Santa (I think her face looks old). Be glad you can’t see the father’s face. But it was interesting to see how the turn of the last century looked (when my grandmom Ruth was born) and they had a loop on the monitor of the real Virginia reading her letter and reply from the newspaper editor.

The workshop where Santa greets the children was special too. Not sure if the owner of the center does that job, but he sure looks like him as we saw him go to the phone and talk to someone about a music box for the center. He turned them down.

Creepy elves

Brian loved the trains. We heard they will be redoing this, it looked pretty nice to us!

I will be unloading all the photos to Flickr sooner or later, so I will add the link here when I do.

Makes me want to not take down the tree, but it’s been up a month now, so I’m thinking dust factory.

I hope you enjoyed these.

Found 4 out of 5 geocaches! Ate at Pizza Hut-it’s been a long time and it was just as greasy good as I remember it. ; )   Got some 60% off goodies at The Christmas Tree Shoppe (store) and because I signed up for email, I got $10 off my total .

We also stopped at a Dutch market. The prices of their meat and lunch meat cant’ be beat!

Good day!

In closing-the neatest ‘cache’ of the day!

Oh I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner-lol! Those Lancaster caches had over 200 logs!