Lamplight Tours

A few weeks ago my organization was asked to help decorate the local museum for their annual Holiday Lamplight Tours. The Lamplight Tours is where the museum is decorated for Christmas and the historic buildings are housed with carolers in their old-style clothing. Carriage rides, food vendors, house tours and information about each of the buildings was all including in the tour. We assembled and decorated about 15 different sized Christmas trees and fluffed and prettified about 20 wreaths. All the decorations that we helped with were placed all around the museum grounds and in the old, historic buildings. We agreed to help decorate and provide volunteers that would help if they would let us have a book sale during the night of the Lamplight Tours. The museum agreed and they had the perfect room for us. One of the historic buildings on the museum's grounds was filled will ten trees that were chose to represent 10 non-profits in the community. Each tree was sponsored by a different Kiwanis club and they decorated them perfectly for each of the needs. The Bakersfield Rescue Mission tree was decorated with socks. The mission provides housing, food and religious teaching to the homeless. Once the tour is over, the socks and all the goodies under the tree will be donated to the Rescue Mission. The SPCA tree was covered with tons of cat and dog toys, food and yummy treats. There were bags of food and warm beds placed under the tree. Hopefully the homeless pets in the community will get adopted soon, but if not then they will get spoiled for the length of time they are with the SPCA. Trees lined both sides of the room...other trees were the Gleaners, filled with food; Make a Wish, filled with donation cards and past experiences for families. It was a great location for our non-profit's book sale. We set up 4 tables through the middle of the room and we had tons of books that we were hoping to donate to avid readers. The museum ground were beautiful once the sun went down and all the lights were lit. Jason came around 6:30pm to eat dinner with me and I talked him into walking the grounds and seeing all of Bakersfield's history. We walked through some of the first homes built in Bakersfield, one of the original trains to come through Bakersfield, general stores, the jail/courthouse from the 1800s and then Jason found his little piece of history that got him fascinated. The original doctors office, pharmacy, and the hospital is where we spent the most of our time.

I didn't mind waiting for him to read every book cover on the shelves or the medicine bottles in the pharmacy...I was occupied with a sugar covered funnel cake!

The Lamplight Tours was so nice. I'm not sure we would have seen the museum if it weren't for last night. Such history spread on a few acres of land in downtown Bakersfield. Oh, we were successful with our book sale. ALL of our books were gone by 8:00pm that night...yippee!!