White Christmas Visit

We were at church discussing our plans for the day with my sister-in-law. When she found out we were heading to see the White Christmas exhibit at a museum she's never before toured (what?!), she quickly decided to pack up the kiddos and join us. Yay!

It turned out that the family who lined up behind us to see the big tree was our former pastor at the big church! He, of course, also knew K, so we all chatted and then they took a bunch of pictures of us, and we took a bunch of pictures of them :)

Such a fun big tree! The museum gets dozens of offers each year. They consider the potential donations carefully, and then select the "winner." That family is featured as the tree givers while the railroad company arranges to have the tree professionally removed and transported to the museum. Back in the day, the railroad would haul in a giant tree from the west coast on a train. Pretty cool tradition! It's fun to watch the process every year on the internet--last year the video of the tree exploding through the museum doors made late night television talk shows!

BeReal went off while we were in the exhibit. I think Buck's is the most impressive for head placement :) The uniform on the left is the one Bing Crosby actually wore! Several of the display pieces are recreations, as fabrics were often reused for other costuming for other films. Buck said the soldier uniform was in several movies before they snagged it back and rebuilt it to the original :) I didn't read a lot of the signage, because I was hanging out with Mr. M. He's seen the movie a couple of times already this year (he's got me beat; I still haven't watched it this season! Update: I have now!), so he recognized a lot of the costumes and sets--super fun! He'd never done a BeReal before though, so I got to amaze him with a picture of himself with all the big kids at the same time :)

It's been a minute since I last saw this guy pushing around a baby stroller 💖

After peeking in at the elaborate Santa set up for this year's little visitors, Mr. M and I decided to tour the train! Being the size he is (which apparently was the size of a full-grown adult, back in the day), the train compartments and accoutrements seemed spacious and comfortable to him. He thought he might like to spend a week or more riding on the trains! Auntie J was not so sure about this (as I squeezed through the aisles and peeked into the coat closet-sized accommodations. Nahhhhhh. Maybe an upgraded, updated, expanded version? Although I did recently watch the most recent Mission Impossible movie and extended train travel looks less enticing as a result, lol :) A short trip would be fun, though!

Overall--I would have liked there to be more White Christmas movie stuff and more original items (if they even exist anymore). The other traveling exhibit was okay, but really looking at coins and exploring around with Mr. M and the Crew was the best part of the day. And wow, that tree!!