COVID had a huge impact on the Holiday festivities in Victoria. Basically, there were no festivities. Some of our favourite things, like ice-skating and watching the light-up at Butchart Gardens, were not possible this year – everything was cancelled and closed. On the other hand, it seems that individual people had stepped up and decorated their houses beyond what they would typically do in a more normal year. We took advantage of that and drove around the city on Christmas night to see these DIY designs.
We followed a map that someone had created on Google, which showed the most prominent light-up attractions. We spent a couple of hours driving along the route that I made up using a lot of guess work, because the online map didn’t offer any details except a bunch of pins indicating the decorated houses. Upon consideration, I noticed that they were clustered in groups throughout the city, probably because the peer pressure of neighbours putting up the lights pushed the other people in the same neighbourhood to follow suit.
I took my camera, but because it was pouring rain (and because I was lazy), I took most of the pictures without leaving the car. By the time we reached downtown, the rain had stopped, so we parked, walked around shot a few photos of the completely deserted Inner Harbour and the Parliament Building, also illuminated. I also took a picture of the new “Blue bridge” from the Esquimalt side – something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but never found the time.
