Seattle Christmas Tour

Two days before Christmas, we did a family holiday tour of Seattle. Our first stop was the Seattle Center Christmas Market. I had avoided this place in previous years due to the entrance fee, which is not normally charged for markets in other cities and in Europe. Once inside, we had a surprisingly good time at the market. There was lots of good food to try out and many specialty shops to check out. Vivi was excited to find the prolific Seattle mural artist Henry there, and he gave Vivi a free book of his artwork just for talking with him. After spending lots of time and money at the market, we next walked through the Seattle Center Armory, checked out the huge Christmas model train display, and then took the monorail to downtown Seattle.

Our first downtown stop was at the Sheraton's gingerbread display. This annual event includes multiple extravagant gingerbread houses based on a theme. This year's theme was 'Toy Shop Time Machine.' Our next stop was the Teddy Bear Suite at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. Every year, they deck out one of the rooms with teddy bears and holiday decorations. Lily loves teddy bears and is always excited for this stop. We also got a picture of the kids with 'Santa' there. Sadly, this was the first year the kids didn't get a picture with a real Santa.

We next headed down to the waterfront and back up to the busy Pike Place Market. While there, we had a challenge extracting the kids out of the Golden Age Collectibles comic book store. We finished our day by crossing Westlake Center to see the Bon Marche/Macy's/Amazon/Seattle star and on to Dough Zone for a dinner of dumplings.