Christmas at the Ballpark
Normally, we travel for Christmas, as we decided a few years ago that rather than exchange presents as a family we would rather spend that money to travel to fun places and have experiences. Not that we don’t all love Christmas and gifts, but with family spread out everywhere, and the holiday season being one of the few times my wife and daughter were both “off” from work and school it just seemed like a great fit. We have had a bunch of adventures over the years and love planning our annual Christmas trips.
Then came this year, and what was going to be two weeks on Kauai is going to have to become something else. But that is a trip and an adventure that I will share in a week or so, as we are still going to find a way to have some adventure for Christmas. However, a side effect of not having a “big” trip to undertake is that we have been paying attention to more Christmas activities closer to home this year. We are always looking for things to do, with the added challenge of finding things that are preferably outside and socially distanced this year.
As you will hear about more than once, one thing I love doing is attending sporting events, especially hockey and baseball, but I’m up for just about anything. While we don’t have a major league baseball team here in Charlotte, we have taken the opportunity to see a number of AAA games at Truist Field in Uptown. The field is amazing, as it was completed just as we moved into the area, and minor league baseball provides great entertainment at a great price, and a unique opportunity to see some players before they make it big. As a result of seeing those games, I am on their email list of course (because nothing is complete in this world anymore, if it doesn’t come with being placed on some form of email list), but in this case I am happy I am as I would have missed out on some Christmas fun this year.
Truist field is doing a combination Christmas Village and Christmas light celebration this year called Light the Knights (the team is the Charlotte Knights in case you couldn’t figure that out) that we decided to check out. We made our trip last week on a Thursday night, as we were hoping for a smaller crowd – they are selling tickets based on entry times to manage crowd size, and the ballpark is not fully enclosed in any of the areas they are using for the event. They did a great job of decorating the ballpark and I have included some pictures below. We wandered through for about an hour, spending a bunch of time enjoying the decorations and browsing through the small Christmas village. We were spoiled a couple of years ago, when we spent Christmas in Edinburgh and got to experience some truly large Christmas villages, but this was a nice homage to the concept. They used some of the concession stands as food stalls, with plenty of schnitzel and bratwurst with warm drinks and pretzels available.
Overall it was a great night out, and helped build some Christmas spirit as we adapted our plans to the vagaries of 2020. After the holidays I will share about the adventure we did manage to get up to from a food and travel standpoint, but the Christmas lights at the ballpark were a really great way to kick off the season. If you are in the area I highly recommend it and you can find all the details here.
The Free Range Viking
The Free Range Viking 