Ted and I always enjoy walking on Historic Main Street in St. Charles when the holiday lights and decorations are on display from Thanksgiving until New Year’s. We didn’t have time to do this before Christmas, so we went on the Saturday after Christmas. The lights and decorations were still there, but the international Christmas characters, the carolers, and the drum and fife corps no longer perform after Christmas Eve, when a parade sends Santa on his way to deliver gifts to all the good boys and girls.

In winter, the sun sets early enough that the lights are pretty by 4:30 p.m., so that’s when we went. We discovered an advantage to being there on a Saturday winter evening: the shops were open until 9:00 and we could see their merchandise through the windows. We regularly shop at several stores in this area, but we haven’t been in all of them, so it was fun to see what they sell and to make plans to visit some new places the next time we go to Main Street.

The boutique shops on Historic Main Street are all in old houses–some dating back to the 1600s–and people live on the upper level of many of the shops. I think every single shop had decorations and/or holiday lights.

The trees along the street were also decorated, making this a pretty place to walk on a beautiful winter evening. You can tell by the number of parked cars that we were a small part of the crowd looking at the lights–even after Christmas! I was lucky to find a parking spot. (Someone left, so I pulled in.)

The downtown parks had Christmas lights in the trees.

The trees in Frontier Park at the Missouri River glowed with holiday lights along the Katy Trail (foreground).

This tree had a small sleigh and presented a cute photo op for the parents of this little boy.

St. Charles apparently keeps and re-uses its decorations for many years. In 2017, the same sleigh was placed beside a tree along the riverfront in Frontier Park. Our family group attended the Christmas Eve parade that year and I took a photo of Dylan pretending to pull the sleigh, Sky holding the pretend reins, and Teddy along for the ride.