Christmas in Galveston

This weekend is the annual "Dickens on The Strand" Christmas celebration on Galveston Island. Today was a beautiful day... warm and mostly sunny, so off we went. The Island encourages everyone who goes to Dickens to dress up in Victorian costumes. Into my closet I went, and out came a long black skirt, a velvet cape with vintage-looking fringe, and a vintage black-corded purse.

My husband was going to dress up in his pirate costume from our Halloween party, but then he decided not to. He wasn't sure that pirates would have been around in the Victorian era. And wouldn't you know-- there were more than two dozen men there dressed up as pirates. I told him next time, that pirate costume will have to go to Galveston for Dickens.

There were lots of the usual food booths.... Scotch eggs, fried shrimp-on-a-stick, funnel cakes, reuben sandwiches, Mediterranean food, blooming onions, and every kind of fried potato-shape that you can think off. There are lots of restaurants along The Strand in Galveston, but if you're going there for a street festival, it doesn't make sense to be sitting inside a restaurant when all the fun is going on outside.

The problem is that all of those food vendors aren't selling very healthy choices. I had one of those fluffy funnel cakes, and I asked them to put just a teeny-tiny touch of sugar on it, and then I just ate half of it, with a cup of hot cider. (Hot cider. It was 85 degrees out there, but somehow the cider just seemed to be the right thing.) As I was making up my mind about what to eat, I figured that no matter what I ate, nothing would compare to last night's dinner at the downtown Moroccan restaurant.

We tried walking through a couple of the antique shops, but so did a lot of other people, so it wasn't exactly a pleasant shopping experience. And with a lot of the ladies dressed up in those huge hoop-skirted Victorian costumes, trying to make your way from one end of the shop to the other was like going through an obstacle course. (How did Victorian ladies get any shopping done without wrecking half of the store as they walked up and down the aisles?)

The Queen's Parade this afternoon was beautiful.... lots of bagpipe bands and school groups dressed in vintage costumes, and of course, Queen Victoria--- really a local woman who happens to look like a young Victoria, and she's got the "Queen's wave" down perfectly. In one of the other carriages was an actual descendant of Charles Dickens-- the parade wouldn't be the same without a Dickens family member in it. There was also a just-married couple who must have taken their vows at one of the Galveston churches, because they were being driven in a white horse-drawn carriage.

The first weekend in December is always reserved for the Dickens celebration in Galveston. It starts the holiday season for southeast Texas. Next comes our own Open House Christmas party, this coming weekend. Jeez...... it's going to be a busy week for me. Jingle bells.