Christmas Fun at Discovery Kingdom

I had really wanted to go to Disneyland to see it at Christmas time. Disneyland is one of my favorite places- I've been there so many times. However, it is quite far away from where we live and since William is already taking work off for Christmas, we couldn't go. So instead, William found that there were holiday decorations at another theme park much closer to us. Last Saturday, we drove up to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom to not only visit the park, but also to see the World's Largest Christmas Tree. This tree is 125 feet tall, weighs 24,000 lbs, and is covered in 35,000 christmas lights. They drove the tree down from Oregon before using a helicopter to put it up. It is simply massive. Here's the tree in the daylight

We tried to include some actual people so that you would get a better feeling for the size of the tree.

Around the theme park were holiday characters and decorations. Here I am holding Frosty's hand. Frosty the Snowman was the first of many shows that I remember crying in when I was only 4 years old. Its good to see that he's looking so robust, especially here in CA where it is somewhat warm (50 degrees).

Check out the walking Gingerbread people- and that's nobody we know.

YUM. Candy cane- hey, this doesn't taste anything like peppermint! Good thing it isn't cold so my tongue wouldn't get stuck to it!

This is just part of the park normally, but it was so cute and colorful that we had to get a photo.

Choo choo!

So, Discovery Kingdom is a combination of both rides and animal shows. During the holiday season, not everything is open, but a good amount of things so that you are busy for the whole time. They also reduce the admission price, but only if you buy it online. We were there from 4-10 and saw most of the special animal water shows. Here is a slide show of a few of the best moments William was able to capture.



We also went on several of the rides, and our favorite was called Medusa. The line for this wasn't long at all- only about 15 minutes, so we rode on it 3 times. It is supposedly the tallest and fastest roller coaster in Northern California. What I love that is that it was SMOOTH. So many other roller coasters jerk and rattle you around making the ride more of a painful experience than a fun one. But this one had all the great drops, twists and turns, without the jerkiness. William is so funny and did a different pose for the photo each ride. One time he had his hands up, another he was meditating, and finally, sleeping. I would have loved to have shown each one side by side, but not enough to spend $20 for each one of them. Another of the fast rides, Kong, was HORRIBLY jittery- my head was banging around back and forth. At least this time I didn't get whiplash like on the Demon at Great America.

Besides Medusa and the Dolphin show, my favorite part was seeing the Christmas tree in all its splendor.

We took this shot to help show just how densely packed the tree is with lights.

We watched their holiday parade which was actually pretty lame. It was quite short- mainly just the characters that I will show you here. The toy soldier,

Bugs Bunny and Speedy Gonzales

Some reindeer

And no parade would be complete without an appearance from the big guy himself- SANTA! And he gave us the little candy canes so I did end up getting some peppermint in the end

Here's a view of the tree and some of the other rides/decorations reflected in the pond.

It was a great evening, with the exception that William wanted a pretzel and so we searched around the whole park, but they had run out of them, so he had to settle for some garlic fries.