December 19, 2018
I love holiday traditions. I love creating memories that I get to reminisce on and look forward to continuing in the future. Because our families live pretty far apart on the east coast, we alternate where we spend Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s not the most ideal, since I’d obviously love to spend all the holidays with both our families, but it always works out. This year, we’re in Virginia for Christmas and my parents are headed to Turks and Caicos! Lucky them!!
Every year that we spend Thanksgiving in Georgia, we always opt to drive and stop half way at our favorite holiday spot: Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. It’s the perfect way to split up the drive and we absolutely love the Candlelight Christmas tour and staying at our favorite hotel, The Grove Park Inn!
There are so many fun things to do in Asheville. It’s an absolutely gorgeous city (with STUNNING mountain views) and has so many cool antique shops and restaurants. We also love the Grove Park! It’s lobby and patio are amazing and we love grabbing a drink, sitting out on the patio next to the fire and taking in these views!
Every holiday season, the Grove Park hosts the National Gingerbread house competition. This is basically my FAVORITE thing ever and each one of the “houses” (they’re not all houses, our favorite this year was a display of reindeer playing poker!) are absolutely amazing! I love trying to pick which one is the winner in each category, although I’m usually wrong!
After the Gingerbread Competition, we had a gorgeous sunset dinner at one of the many restaurants at the hotel. Seriously, these views. I just couldn’t get enough!!
After dinner we headed into Asheville for our Biltmore Candlelight tour. I can’t share any of the inside pictures I took here since I don’t think it’s technically allowed but you can take my word for it!! It is AMAZING. I’m a huge nerd for all things History and I love shows like Downton Abbey and Biltmore is like touring real life Downton!
The next morning we headed back to Biltmore for a little day time visit and so I could force Brad to take a picture with me using the tripod!! 😛 His love for me is absolutely tremendous! haha!
What are your favorite holiday traditions? Trips? Games? Meals? Leave your favorites in the comments!!
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