photo by: Courtesy of Oglebay Park

The sights of The Hilltop at Oglebay Park during the Festival of Lights only add to the excitement of driving through the park.

There are times in your life when you don’t really understand what you have until it goes away. For me, that was Oglebay’s Festival of Lights.

Don’t get me wrong. I always loved when my mom would take me and my sister through the lights in our childhood. Even then, we were wowed by the giant, colorful displays that honored so many traditions of the holiday season. But then I left Wheeling to start my adult life elsewhere.

My first stop was Southwest Florida. When you’re living minutes away from the beach in Bonita Springs and the biggest question Christmas morning was whether you had to forsake the shorts for long pants, the celebrations were a little different. There, they wrapped lights around palm trees and holiday parades were held with boats motoring down canals. The cognitive dissonance was tough to get over.

Twelve years in the Sunshine State then led to eight years in Charleston, the Mountain State’s capital. It was nice to live in a place where the holidays actually felt like the holidays.

There was a bite in the air and, if we were lucky, some snow on the ground. But Charleston didn’t have anything like the Festival of Lights because it didn’t have anything like Oglebay.

Then, after two decades away, I once again called the Friendly City my home and the Festival of Lights was just a short drive away. Driving through it again wasn’t just as good as I remembered. It was better.

That’s the beauty of Oglebay, always looking for ways to improve on a tradition. As I took my family through the displays, I saw the ones I remembered from years past. There were the 12 Days of Christmas, all lined up. The leaping deer were still bounding along the field. So were the skiers. The dinosaurs were on full display. (Sure, dinosaurs have as much to do with Christmas as Santa Claus has to do with dinosaurs, but, hey, there’s a little something for everyone here.)

But those classics were paired with some new features. T

he displays at the Hilltop were gorgeous, as were the lights that bounced off the mansion to holiday music.

It offered families the opportunity to park their cars and, instead of just cruising through the park, get out on foot and get a closer, longer look at some spectacular sights.

And there are even more spectacles this year, like Reflections On Schenk Lake, where colored lights dance across the water in time to holiday music. It’s just more motivation to pack the family in the car and take another drive around the park.

The Festival of Lights is something that widens my eyes with wonder as much now that I’m a middle-aged dad as it did when I was a child. It’s why I love jumping in the car and slowly rolling along the park’s paths, gazing upon the displays I’ve cherished and the ones I’m seeing for the first time.

I’ve lived plenty of places and celebrated many holiday seasons there in my adult life.

They’ve had their pluses. But they didn’t have the Festival of Lights. The Festival is Oglebay. It’s Wheeling. It’s home.