Main Street Christmas: Holiday Celebration in St. Charles, Missouri

The Christmas Traditions crew turns out for late-night shopping and a candlelit procession on Wednesdays and Fridays and parades on weekend afternoons. Natalie and I join the throngs on Friday. Kids race to collect baseball-style cards from the characters while a fife and drum corps plays cheerful tunes.

Shop doors jingle as we pop into beautifully preserved 18th- and 19th-century buildings. The prickly perfume of fresh pine mingles with the heady cinnamon scent floating from Grandma's Cookies. We succumb to nostalgia and take a carriage ride, only to discover that brick streets make for quite a bumpy trip. Cocoa sloshing, we laugh hysterically but fall silent when we round the corner to see Main Street stretch before us again, a fairyland of white lights.