The Holiday Trail of Lights is a festival held in Northwest Louisiana during the Christmas season.
Six North Louisiana cities participate in the Trail: Natchitoches (pronounced NAK-uh-tush), Shreveport, Bossier City, Minden, Monroe-West Monroe, Alexandria-Pineville.
The Natchitoches Christmas Festival, also called the "Festival of Lights," in Natchitoches was started in 1927, making it one of the oldest Light Festivals in the US. In the largest city, Shreveport, the offerings include a choreographed laser light show in the Barnwell Garden and Art Center, "Christmas in Roseland" at the American Rose Center, and a weekly fireworks extravaganza. Candlelight tours of historic homes are popular attractions in all of the cities. In Natchitoches, Louisiana it is known as the Natchitoches Christmas Festival or Festival of lights.
All of the cities are within a one hour drive of each other and hold parades during the festival and offer what the official website calls "Southern hospitality".
Famous quotes containing the words holiday, trail and/or lights:
“With a broad shoehorn
I am unstuffing a big bird in this dream
Msomebody else’s holiday feast—
and repacking the crop of my own,
knowing it will burst with such
onion, oyster, savory bread crust.”
—Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)
“Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation.... His recent tracks still give variety to a winter’s walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip-toe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To motorists bound to or from the Jersey shore, Perth Amboy consists of five traffic lights that sometimes tie up week-end traffic for miles. While cars creep along or come to a prolonged halt, drivers lean out to discuss with each other this red menace to freedom of the road.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)