We met Kristen, Drew, and his parents at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens for Garden Nights, Holiday Lights. There were some indoor elements to it, but we stayed outside the whole time. At the garden, they had large sculptures for the characters from Alice in Wonderland. They were lit up for the display. Most everyone there was wearing masks and we were outside, so it felt pretty safe.
We saw the chess set from the movie. One of Annabelle’s favorites was the sculpture of the queen playing croquet. AB got a kick out of the flamingo that was used as a mallet. Drew’s dad, Scott, told us that the sculptures have little pockets on them that hold plants. Over time they learned which plants worked best in the pockets to grow into shapes for the sculptures. I don’t think there were any plants in the sculptures for this time of year though. We did see a grass sculpture that came from Montreal Canada. That one actually had grass growing on it that was probably dormant this time of year.
One section had holiday trains. It reminded me of the train display that I saw at The Milwaukee Domes. It seemed that about half of the tracks were empty though. We wanted around to see if trains would come but often they never did. I thought it would have been perfect if one of the model railroad buildings was a gingerbread house but it seems they didn’t think of that.
There was a tunnel that was lit up with bright yellowish white lights to walk under. The grand finale for the display was a large section that had rope lights coming down from the sky. The lights were programmed to coincide with music that was playing. When we walked into that section, they were playing a song that had something to do with fire. The rope lights were alternating yellow and red colors. Annabelle even thought it looked like fire. It was amazing. We lingered in that section, slowly going through it, until we heard the whole sound track play and loop back to the beginning.