Last week, our family spent the week on a winter, Christmas-y vacation in Branson, Missouri. When we’re in Branson in December, one of our favorite places to stop is Chateau on the Lake to view their Christmas decorations. Have you ever been there? It sits right on Table Rock Lake near the dam. When the Chateau first bought their decorations, they spent $300,000 on them! Their gingerbread houses are ahhhmazing!
Here’s a little tour of what we saw this year when we visited…..
When we arrived, we took the picture of them all in the sleigh in front of the hotel. It was a gorgeous day, but no, my 1 year old does not have on shorts. I guess his sister let his pant leg ride all the way up, lol.
This was literally the best picture I got. Eyes closed and all! Can’t win every time I guess. 🙂
When we first walked into the doors, we were greeted with this beauty.
Then, we walked through to the amazing Gingerbread houses. Each year their chef designs them along with the kitchen staff. They use 300 pounds of powdered sugar, 120 pounds of egg whites, and 600 pounds of candy, cookies, pretzels and crackers. It takes 75 hours to make the store fronts, 50 hours to do the church and 50 hours for the chalet (houses).
See the shingles of the roof? They’re iced oatmeal cookies on one side and chocolate cookies on the other.
See the chimney bricks below? They’re white chocolate squares!
I love all the little details that they thought up. The windshield of this graham cracker truck was a piece of fruit leather!
I think my favorite house was this storefront that is all made with white chocolate squares. Maybe it’s the chocolate that makes me happy?! 🙂
The place was decorated absolutely gorgeously! Here’s a few more parts of the hotel…..
One of the Christmas trees.
I love this Nutcracker….
Santa was dangling from a rope way up high near the 10th story of the hotel…..
Last, but certainly not least, the beautiful, only 2 of it’s kind, Nativity Scene. This was created by The Fontinini Family from Italy. It was originally bought for $125,000, but Mr. Fontinini has visited the Chateau and individually signed each piece, making it worth a whole lot more than that! Each piece is hand crafted and hand painted. Only family members are allowed to work on each piece while creating a new nativity scene…..and then only after years of training.
Have you seen this Nativity scene before? There was one other made like it in the world and it was in a movie….can you guess which movie?
It was in Home Alone. In this scene…… (which is very hard to see I know, but Kevin was pretending to be one of the figures)
There you have it. Some very festive Christmas decorations that we all can be in awe of.
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