Texas Style Weekend

We enjoy small town celebrations, so when we heard that Archer City was hosting "Christmas on the Square" we headed that direction one evening. Texas posts a population sign at the outskirts of every town, so we knew that Archer City has 1,750 citizens. We're pretty sure all of them showed up for the Christmas celebration. We were there for the lighting of the official Archer City Christmas tree, situated on the square in front of the Archer county courthouse.

We ate dinner from one of the food trucks parked around the square. It's good to be back in Texas, where they know how to make barbecue! We also headed to Royal Theater, where the high school band was providing the accompaniment music for the first through fourth grade students singing Christmas carols. With all the students on the stage and parents and spectators making a standing-room-only crowd, we're sure we were way over the fire marshal's occupancy maximum at the Royal Theater.

We had a day of rain, where our view out the motor home windshield looked soggy. It was a good day to catch up with tasks around home, and Mark was only too happy to stay inside and watch the Oklahoma college bedlam game. That's why we decided to stay the extra two days at Lake Arrowhead--we had good phone and television signals. Those are two things that come in handy on rainy days.

So we rested up during the rainy day to save our energy for date night in Wichita Falls. This included a stop at Midwestern State University (MSU) for "Fantasy of Lights."

This public university hosts one of the largest holiday displays of its kind. It brings well-known children's stories to life, coupled with 20,000 lights outlining the university's buildings.

This Christmas display started in the 1920's when Mr. and Mrs. Burns put out their first Christmas display. Fueled by a large income from the oil industry, their display grew until their deaths in the 1970's. Wanting to leave the Christmas display close to home, their heirs donated it to MSU. Now there are more than 200,000 visitors each year to the university to see the 36 animated scenes in the "Fantasy of Lights."

We were glad to see that after Santa, Cinderella, Toy Story, and other silly children's tale, the corner spot was reserved for the real reason for all the festivities--Jesus's birth. Good job Midwestern State University!

The other reason we are glad to be in Texas is the number of dance halls in this state. After traveling on the east coast where dancing seems to be out-lawed, we had several choices for places to two-step in Wichita Falls. One offered free dance lessons, and even waived the cover charge for anyone coming to the lessons--double score! So we learned a new (very complicated) two-step move and danced all evening for free. We left at 10:30 p.m. when the dance floor got too crowded, and there was still a long line of people coming in. Texans love to dance! Mark pointed out that mathematically we were old enough to be grandparents of many of the other dancers. With that sobering thought, we were glad that we stayed up with them for a couple hours anyway.

In between rain showers at Lake Arrowhead, we spent more time bird-watching at the state park. We were thoroughly entertained by a beautiful red-tailed hawk that would let us get close enough to take pictures.

We liked the more natural background pictures in the trees, but we could see him best when he was perched on this metal rail. He looked headless in this pose, as he was preening feathers on his back.

We've always heard the phrase "ruffling a few feathers" and this guy was ruffling more than just a few. Denisa laughed out loud when she saw this picture. He looked like a completely different bird all fluffed up like that!

After all that ruffling, it took a while before his feathers settled back down into the beautifully smooth breast feathers we had seen earlier.

As much as we enjoyed watching him, he seemed to be strangely interested in watching us as well.

When he finally got tired of us, he soared effortlessly away to a new tree top. We know he won't go hungry with so many gopher rats residing at the park.

We are easily entertained, as we love watching wildlife. We are so blessed to have the time to visit places like state and national parks without having to hurry home to go to work. For example, we could sit and watch our resident prairie dogs doing some landscaping work to repair the damage that a day of rain did to their homes.