Every year, the Missouri Botanical Garden offers a holiday light display called “Garden Glow.” Ted and I decided we should experience it before the lights were turned off on January 6. It was a calm, crisp January evening and we had a beautiful holiday walk in the park (literally).

Everything seems to eventually become an abbreviation these days, and this event was no exception. At the entrance to the garden, the decorators assumed “Garden” and simply announced the display as “Glow.” All of the light displays were prettier than the pictures. In addition, pretty instrumental music played softly throughout the garden all the while we walked.

From a distance, this looked like a wall of hanging lights. As we came closer, we saw that it was a number of individual large trees with strings of lights hanging from their branches.

This display changed color every few seconds.

The Botanical Garden has a hedge maze all year, and it was decorated with lights for the holidays. Past experience has taught me that I get claustrophobic and panicky in mazes, so I avoid them. In this case, I figured it couldn’t be too bad to walk through it because the building where I stood to take the photo on the right was at the entrance, and I could always see it from within the maze. All I had to do to get out was head toward that building. It worked. Ted and I walked through the maze and I could always see which direction to go to get out. The downside was that there were no visible shortcuts, so it took a long time to navigate the twists and turns to get to the exit. It was fun to be wandering between walls of holiday lights with other people also working their way through the maze.

These tree displays also changed colors every few seconds. No matter which color they were, the lights were beautiful.

A projector decorated this building differently about every 30 seconds. We watched for almost twenty minutes, and didn’t see a repeated projection, so we walked on.

This was my favorite display. The picture looks a little eerie, but the blue lights on the huge tree had a magical quality in person. I almost expected to see Christmas fairies.

It was a beautiful winter night and there were fire bowls and refreshment stands with warm beverages throughout the park. Ted and I were dressed warmly and had a wonderful time. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.