Every year, many towns have an annual holiday celebration and the Berkeley Heights Winter Walk is the tradition for Berkeley Heights. We’ve never taken the kids to anything quite like this so we decided to give it a try this year — even if it would have to be a relatively quick visit with the me SEC Championship game starting in the middle of it.
Timing
The event ran from 3-6pm, ending with Santa and fireworks. Portions of Springfield were supposed to begin closing down at 1pm, but they must have ended up doing it way later because we were wondering if this was really happening!
Line-up
They did a great job of varying up the activities for the kids with things for all ages. Santa visited earlier in the day, which we missed out on since we had plans to visit Santa elsewhere. I was a bit stressed out to find that Santa was continually walking around during the Winter Walk. Thankfully I managed to keep Q from realizing it was a different Santa!!
The Experience
The kids loved all of the freebies, which were much more plentiful with us arriving before the technical start time. We came home with Christmas-colored bagels from Craft Bagel, free hand sanitizer from Summit Medical Group, zeppoles from Grazi’s Kitchen and a windshield scraper from the Berkeley Heights Educational Association — just to name a few.
Some of the high schoolers from the hockey team were teaching kids how to skate on a makeshift rink space. The kids wanted to come back once they were set up but we didn’t end up having enough time.
They made paint spun and sticker ornaments for the tree. As well as some reindeer food, which apparently we need to sprinkle on our yard on Christmas Eve to attract the reindeer. Noted. And we came home with a stack of candy canes, which will collect dust because no one ever eats them!
The big hit though was the walk-in snow globe, which understandably also came with a massive line. The time was in part due to the spacing out of participants, which I didn’t really mind since I appreciated that they weren’t packing people in.
Overall it was a great way to keep the kids entertained and get more into the holiday spirit!
Leave a Reply