Vancouver Holiday Activities Schwartz Style

Are you looking for fun and relatively inexpensive holiday activities to do with your family?  Do you love looking at beautifully decorated trees and sparkly lights?  If you do, this is the post for you.  Gram and Bubby came for a visit last weekend and we packed in a lot of holiday activities into one day.  We didn't want to waste a minute of our visit.

We started the day baking and decorating gingerbread cookies. This year we used Pillsbury gingerbread ready-made dough to save time.  The dough is relatively easy to work with, if chilled, and tastes delicious.

After lunch we headed downtown on the Canada Line to take in the sights and sounds at the Hyatt's Gingerbread Lane.  Now in its twenty second year, it is amazing the different themes and scenes on display.  We adored the Whoville exhibit featuring the Grinch.

 Next we headed to the Four Seasons hotel to see the Festival of Trees.  Sarah posed with Gram in front of this very pink tree, her favourite of course.

 Back to the Canada Line we headed, to grab a quick bite and then to opening weekend of Festival of Lights at VanDusen Gardens.

 The Festival of Lights is one of my favourite holiday traditions.  It seems to be more beautiful every year.  The weather last weekend was perfect for wandering around the garden enjoying the lights and Christmas carols.  So we weren't the only ones.

Sarah was into posing for pictures that night.  So we took full advantage of her willingness to participate and her cute face.

Jack and Sarah rode on Santa's sleigh.

They posed as little angels, which they are most of the time.

Then they wanted to be Santa and an elf although there was some arguing as Jack insisted on being Santa.

Sarah couldn't get enough light show that is choreographed to music every half hour.  We watched the show three times.

I took this photo and I am darn proud of it.

We used the bribe of a cookie to get these sibling snuggle shots.  Sometimes a cookie goes a long way.

It was a splendiferous day, gingerbread, trees and lights all wrapped up in the perfect package.
What is your favourite local holiday activitiy?