Waco Wonderland and Christmas on Fifth Street

I'm glad to be back home in Texas for the holidays!

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and now I'm really getting excited for Christmas.

downtown Waco at Christmastime

The first real Christmassy thing we did was head to downtown Waco one afternoon to check out "Waco Wonderland", a new local festival that the city is putting on.

It turned out to be pretty small, but I hope that it can grow into something really amazing in the future.

For now, there was a nice tree, a small stage with holiday performances throughout the day, a few carnival rides, a place where kids can meet Santa, and several local food trucks.

I wasn't overly impressed with Waco Wonderland, but it's nice to see the city trying to do something festive!

We stayed for a while to listen to the local ukulele group's Christmas concert.

We also attended Christmas on Fifth Street, an annual Christmas festival at the Baylor University campus. This was every bit as festive and magical as I had hoped it would be, and it brought back a lot of great memories of my student days at Baylor!

Christmas on Fifth Street has been a Baylor tradition since 1988, and it's a big deal in town. Campus is decorated in trees and lights, there was a live Nativity scene, lots of places to take photos, a Christmas market, tons of food trucks, and several musical performances. We got to listen to the university's brass band play several Christmas classics, and we stayed to watch the Department of Foreign Languages put on their annual concert.

Each department performed "Silent Night" in their language as well as another traditional Christmas carol from that country. Baylor has a huge foreign language department, and we got to hear song from the departments of Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The Korean group was the most enthusiastic, and had choreographed their songs! I swear I'm not biased, but I thought that the German group was the most talented (they were also the largest group performing). I got to see a few of my old German professors after the performance, which was great too.

It's really feeling like Christmas here now!