Victorian Belle Holiday 2018: impressive lights, lines, horror

Today we attended the holiday celebration at the Victorian Belle, a menagerie of Christmas lights and waiting in the cold to see the inside of a crowded old house. It also serves as a reminder that there are too many families in Portland now, and any family activity will be absolutely mobbed. Nice job moving here, all of us.

If you end up going, you’ll be presented with a staggering arrangement of Christmas lights. It’s truly awe-inspiring and in no way diminished by the many minion and troll movie novelty yard inflatables. You’ll have to wait in a long line to see the arrangements, though. Then you’ll have to wait in a long line while seeing them, and another long line to be done seeing them. It only took me a year to lose my midwestern winter fortitude, but it’s well and truly gone now. Milling about in 40 degrees is cold, and despite all the light provided, there was no ambient heat. It was a god damn LED heat tease.

Eventually, we found ourselves waiting to go inside the mansion, a portion of the venue I do not recommend. It was a 40 minute line that snakes through a crowded, musty house you can’t seem to leave no matter how bad the fire code is violated. Their claims of a Christmas tree in every room were quickly dismissed by a five year old who pointed out there wasn’t one in the small water closet the tour passed through. We put up with it because we expected to get some hot cocoa at the end, but those expectations were also dashed. I asked an employee dressed as a large elf where we could get some hot cocoa, and after a couple suggestions, he revealed he actually had no idea.

Overall, I give this attraction two porta potties out of five, because there were literally two porta potties for the 1000 people who were in attendance this evening.