Life's Magic Moments: December Family Outing

Visting the lights at Temple Square in Salt Lake City! The highlight of our day!

The Saturday before Christmas we had a great family outing. We started out with a hayride at the court house. These Clydesdale horses are a Morgan tradition. Every year they give hayrides at the Santa Visit. Santa arrives by fire engine and sits in the main area of the court house while kids line up down the hall to wait for a chance to visit him. The local Lions Club provides a bag of candy for each kid...it hasn't changed much over the many years since I was little. It has gum drops, salt water taffy and gumdrop orange slices. They have removed the hard striped candy since my last visit. The kids had no interest in seeing Santa again so we enjoyed the hayride and I procured some bags of candy from my Lions' Club buddies. Too bad Grandpa wasn't there to eat our black gum drops. I commented to the Lions' members that there weren't too many black gumdrops and they said, "It's because we eat all of them as we bag the candy!"

After our ride, we headed to Salt Lake to visit and eat at City Creek shopping center, enjoy the Church History Museum and to look at the lights at Temple Square. We had a great day and it wasn't super cold, only cold to very cold!

Waiting for the Clydesdale horses to bring the hay wagon for our ride.

Courtney and Grace smile for a quick picture before the hayride takes off. There were so many kids that I took pictures and waited it out while they took their ride around the block with Becca.

Irelynd, Londyn, Becca and Dresdyn on the hayride.

Caroline posing in front of a City Creek store on one of the rocks that line the indoor creek.

This was our first trip to City Creek Shopping Center and we had a great time. The food court was perfect because they had Chick-Fil-A for mom and McDonalds for dad...but he did get waffle fries from Chick-Fil-A because we all know they are the best. I have almost all of the children converted to Chick-Fil-A!

Standing in front of the Salt Lake Temple on our way to the Church History Museum. Caroline refused to be in the picture.

And then she changed her mind!

Courtney posing with the chickens at the Church History museum. The kids LOVE the children's area and enjoy playing there for a long time.

Caroline loved the dancing area where you get to put on very full skirts and learn to do Latin American dances. They even had a big skirt I could wear, but lucky for you, no one took a picture. Lucky for me, it was also a full skirt and I could twirl is out. Who doesn't love to twirl out a skirt and see it spin?

We got invited to hear a story by one of the workers. She told a story about making molasses cookies in Orderville, UT at Christmas one year in pioneer times. She had the kids help her act out opening the molasses crock. They loved it! She was amazing and so were the cookies that she gave us at the end!

As we left the museum, Matt and Joseph were invited to give the kids a ride in the handcart. The missionary in charge of the rides said we were his 2,432 ride that he'd given while serving at the museum. He was very nice and fun.

Getting ready to pull.

It was a fun ride for the kids, but I can only imagine what a challenge it was for our ancestors who came in handcart companies 1,200 miles by foot from Iowa City, Iowa with everything they owned in the handcart. We had family come in three different handcart companies to Utah. Two of the trips were hard, but they arrived in good time and fairly good weather. The third company was the Martin Handcart Company with our ancestors Jemima Cook and John Toone. They all suffered terribly through snow and cold, starvation and exhaustion. They were rescued and lived while almost 1/3 of their company died. I just finished reading a book about the Willie and Martin companies and it is a miracle that so many survived!