Yankee Candle Village

The day after Thanksgiving we took the kiddos up to the Yankee Candle Village Flagship Store in Williamsburg, VA.  Lorien won a certificate to dip her hand into wax, so we thought we'd take the whole family up for a good time.

I had no idea what this place really was.  We had a blast & can't wait to go back.

I thought this was just a candle shop.  Boy was I wrong.  It's MASSIVE.  The whole thing is set up like an outdoor colonial village.  The ceiling is painted blue like the sky & has clouds so it feels like you're outside when you're actually inside.  There are a bazillion stores in there.  There's the obvious candle store, a home store, a Virginia local item store, an ornament store, a German carving store, a Christmas village store, a fudge shop, a popcorn shop, & more.  Those are just the ones we went into.  There were several we didn't even go in.  We bought tons of fudge at the fudge shop.  And I loved exploring the home & kitchen stores as well as the Virginia specialty store.  I bought a ton of Christmas presents for friends in them.  

The girls were first to find Santa's naughty/nice list & couldn't wait to write their names in it under 

"nice."

Santa was also there with Mrs. Claus.  The kids enjoyed telling Santa what they wanted for Christmas

(I always love it because my kids are so non-specific.  They literally say "Surprise me!")

Santa loves to hear stuff like that from them.

We also found a room where it was dark like nighttime & every four minutes the ceiling actually snows on the kids.  My kids were loving it!

We had a blast exploring every inch of the village, but the main purpose for coming was to get Lorien's hand dipped in wax as her prize for doing well in school.

First they dipped her hand in ice cold water with soap to disinfect her hand.

Then they started the hot wax process.  First she'd dip her hand (which she posed in an "I Love You" sign) in hot wax. . . 

then in ice cold water. . . 

& again in the wax, & then cold, water, etc.  They did this about 5 times until the wax became thick like a candle.

It was really bizarre watching the lady literally just pull the wax hand off of Lorien's real hand.  I slid right off like it was no big deal.

The lady doing the dipping then dipped the edges back in the wax & cold water to finish it off so it would stand up on it's own.

And finally Lorien got to choose what colors she wanted her final hand to be.  She chose to dip half of it in pink & half of it in green.  She also asked the lady to leave one stripe down the middle white so it would be 3 colors total.  It looked really cool all finished.

 

It was a really fun afternoon for all of us.  We will definitely be going back there again.  I'm so glad I live by all these really cool things.  I love Virginia.