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CONNECTICUT — Gentlemen, start your reindeer! The dawn of Black Friday begins the official start of the holiday season in Connecticut, and there’s no shortage of shopping and other entertainments to maintain your merry mood.
Here’s but a sampling:
Winterfest at Powder Ridge Park in Middlefield opens Friday, will run weekends through Dec. 22., and is quite the experience. There’s day and night tubing down the mountain, with a DJ and laser light shows, live music, food trucks, an artisan market, a kids’ play area, an adult beverage area, and Santa, obviously. Tickets are available here.
Marvel at the tallest Christmas tree in the state while traipsing through hundreds of thousands of twinkling lights at Lake Compounce in Bristol. The “12th Annual Holiday Lights” is a Christmas theme park, running Nov. 29–Dec. 29, where you can enjoy rides, games, nightly light shows and activities like building your own snow globe. Tickets are available here.
If you like lights and are in the mood for some excess, check out “Glow Hartford,” the Holiday Light Festival and Market which opens Friday and runs through Dec. 29 at the Connecticut Convention Center. You’ll find interactive light gardens, illuminated structures, family-friendly activities, a holiday market daily live entertainment and plenty more — including a “glow-comotive train.” Tickets are here.
But if it’s trains you’re looking for, look no further than the Wilton Historical Society’s Great Trains Holiday Show, pulling into the station on Friday, Nov. 29 at noon and staying through Jan. 20. You’ll find every manner of model train layout winding through tiny towns and tunnels, with plenty of buttons to push and lots of experts on hand to “talk trains.”
After checking out the trains in Wilton on Friday, grab something to eat and then hit the next town over for Ridgefield’s Festival of Lights. Ridgefield looks like a picture print from Currier & Ives most of the year, but from Thanksgiving through New Year’s it goes full-on nice and rosy / comfy cozy. It all starts with the throwing of the switch outside Town Hall at 6 p.m.
New London also knows how to do the holiday season, and leans in heavy on the multi-culti. “Merry Days & Jolly Nights” begin Nov. 29, and there are sleighfuls of art shows, holiday markets, live music performances, ice carvings, and more trains. Everything begins with the Christmas Tree Lighting at 5 p.m., but other high points in the celebration include December 25th – the Lighting of the Menorah on Dec. 25, Kwanzaa- Kinara lighting on Dec. 26, and the Three Kings Celebration on Jan. 12. All the details can be found here.
This marks the 14th year that the Friends of Wood Memorial Library and Museum in South Windsor have been decking out gingerbread houses during the holiday season. This year’s festival, “Snowed Inn,” opens Nov. 29 and runs through Dec. 22. It’s free and open to the public, and its accompanying market is a great place to score some unique gifts and stocking stuffers.
The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk is showing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer 4D,” now through New Year’s Eve That 4th “D” is scents, bubbles, wind, mists and other sensations you might expect from winter, elvish workshops and abominable snowmen. Assemble your own crew of Misfit Toys and head over to the aquarium’s 4D Theater, where Rudolph will be saving Christmas every hour on the :45, beginning at 10:45 a.m. daily, now through New Year’s Eve. It sounds crazy, but so did Yukon Cornelius, and yet you love him, to this very day…