doodledee

Friday night was our annual trip downtown to see the battery-powered winter night parade spectacular that goes by the name of Holidazzle. We had originally planned on the whole winter evening downtown ritual: a walk over to Field's to see the 8th floor auditorium show, a quick light dinner, then out to the mall to watch the parade. When we got there, however, we quickly realized that like 20,000 other people had formulated the *exact* same agenda we had, so we skipped the two hour wait for the animatronic princess and her wicked stepsisters and went right to dinner.

As with other years, we ended up at the 'Sky Room' thing at Field's for dinner. I concluded it was the best option for a number of reasons: it's convenient, it's kid friendly, and the food actually isn't all that bad. (I'd add that it's almost even kind of cheap, but it's obviously all relative. That said, a $7 plate of spaghetti with some nice spicy sausage - cooked to order, no less - is far from the worst deal downtown.) Over dinner I thought about what our other options would have been, and I decided that there really weren't any, especially on a Friday. I have no idea where the other 19,997 people down there were planning on eating, but somebody could be making a killing during the holidays by offering up some additional options. Oh wait, I forgot, downtown isn't for people with kids. My bad.

The parade was great. The crowds were big and festive - to the point where our whole area broke out in spontaneous christmas carols several times throughout the evening - and I think the energy fed back to the marchers because they were all happy and waving and smiling and high-fiving and all that crap. When Santa rolled through at the end, the mood elevated into almost a New Years Eve caliber frenzy with people screaming and jumping up and down and I even saw a couple of dudes climbing a lightpole to get a better look. That was unexpected.

My favorite parts were when a) the big snowman thing had to stop right in front of us to wait for a traffic light and he did like a million spins and b) when I got to explain to my kid how the people cowering in the warmth of the skyways were wimps.