The Land of Eternal Christmas

We are in the land of eternal Christmas (It's like the opposite of Narnia). We started off our day at Bronners which is:

Which made me feel like this:

I can't possibly describe to you just how...red and green Bronner's is, so I'm just going to post a few pictures...

It's just kind of insane really. I literally got exhausted from roaming this store. It's this decked out all year long.  They are closed for five days out of the entire year: New Years, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas (and one more but I can't remember).  But the cool and slightly odd part of the store is that they cater to all belief systems, as you can see here:

And they have even figured out how to please all parties.  

Can you tell what that is? If not, let me regale you with the intricacies laid out before us. It's like a crockpot meal of Christmas...Santa and baby Jesus simmering on low for eight hours. Dash of nativity, a pinch of ho ho ho...Santa is kneeling at baby Jesus' manger. I thought that was....ahem....weird. Yeah, let's go with weird.

There was room after room (after room) of ornaments. Everything you could possibly think of and then some...

The alien one especially made us think of my mom. They had a section devoted to fake trees and lighting which is where we found Santa rappelling. 

Josh and I were pretty certain that Dave Tanis would approve of his technique....

They had an entire room devoted to antique Precious Moments and Goebel Hummel figurines.  In that room they also had four glass cases with nativity scenes from around the world in them.  Some of them were awesome!

After we left Bronner's we went further into Frankenmuth to explore some of the less kitschy (only by a little though) shops. We got a little silly...

Don't you just kinda wish that he'd say, "Please sir, can i have some more?"

But, I think my favorite was probably the popcorn shop...They had like 32 different kinds of popcorn. I've decided that this is what heaven will be like. 

We stopped in at the Ultimate Mirror Maze, paid our eight bucks and proceeded to get lost in a maze of 2000 square feet of mirrors. It was pretty awesome. We had to wear gloves so that we didn't get prints on the mirrors, because that would be cheating after all. It's for good reason that horror movies are filmed in funhouses. But filming it would be an absolute nightmare.

Frankenmuth is a very picturesque and quaint little town, and with the Christmas lights and the fresh dusting of snow frosting the evergreen trees, it was downright postcard material.

However we did find some oddities to the village....

This is the Moonwalk Man Moon Bounce. I took this picture. Josh says it looks like a holy place.

Josh took this one. He said that now it looks like a crackhouse.

The following sign gave us a good chuckle. A good enough one in fact, that we turned around to get a picture of it.

"Coming Soon: Digital Sign"...It's a good thing they warned us. If it just appeared all digital and such, it might give me heart palpitations.

Tomorrow we're off to go even further up Michigan, Newaygo to be exact. One of Josh's old roommates is living there now and we're going to visit him for a few days. It'll be fun to see a familiar face again!