Sky lanterns, essentially small paper hot air balloons, have grown in popularity recently after being used and made in Asia for years. In some festivals, hundreds of balloons float in the air, illuminating the night sky.
That won’t be the case in Maryland. Responding to increased use of the balloons, Maryland’s fire marshal has explicitly banned sky lanterns, citing their ability to start fires.
On Jan. 6, 12 days after Christmas, Christians around the world observe Epiphany, or Three Kings Day. The holiday celebrates the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus. Celebrated in some countries like Christmas, the day brings with it parades and pageants to mark the end of the winter holiday season.
Miles away from their families and their homes, troops in Afghanistan held Christmas celebrations at military bases and outposts. Soldiers from the U.S., France, and other countries involved in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) shared each other’s company for a traditional Christmas meal at the Kabul International Airport on Christmas Day. German Bundeswehr soldiers, meanwhile, set up traditional Christmas markets at their military outposts in Afghanistan.
Baltimore has a monument lighting, New York has the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and Washington has a national menorah lighting. Around the world, though, holiday traditions range from religious ceremonies (like nine consecutive masses in Manila) to contemporary takes on pagan traditions.
What’s your favorite holiday tradition? Tell us in the comments.
Baltimore residents put on stellar displays for the holiday season, from Hampden’s luminous 34th Street decorations to complex Christmas gardens. But how does a “Bawlmer Christmas” stack up against its global equivalents? We’ve rounded up some of the world’s better light displays to find out.
What does Christmas in Baltimore mean to you? Can it be viewing the wonderful light displays on 34th Street, visiting Santa for wishes of toys and puppies, amazed by intricate Christmas gardens or listening to merry tunes like “Crabs For Christmas.” In the latest retro installment from The Darkroom, we highlight Christmas trees, Santas, and decorations of years past. Take a stroll through memory lane or find tips for your holiday style. Photos featured include those from Sun photographers A. Aubrey Bodine, Lloyd Pearson, Walter McCardell, Richard Stacks, Weyman Swagger and Jed Kirschbaum.
Holiday train gardens are a tradition for many local fire stations, including the Baltimore City fire house on Glen Avenue in Mount Washington. The Shops at Kenilworth in Towson also has an elaborate garden around its fountain.
The gardens feature dozens of scenes with action figures, Baltimore landmarks, moving parts and, of course, trains.
The gallery shows images from both train gardens, and the video below is from Glen Avenue.
Arguably, Santa’s busiest day is December 24, while he packs up his sleigh and flies around distributing toys to the world’s good little girls and boys. As for the other 364 days of the year, you may have been told that Santa is back in his North Pole workshop directing elves on the creation of new gizmos, gadgets and whatchamacallits that will appear on the wish lists of said girls and boys next Christmas. So, it may surprise you to find out that Santa has an interest in a diverse array of activities he tends to throughout the year, and not always under the guise of holiday promotion. And not always as a singular male person.
On Thursday, November 15, workers set up the annual tradition of the large poinsettia tree at The Mall in Columbia. They used about 1,000 plants — mostly red, but a few white — and took more than 14 hours to complete the tree of poinsettias.
Work began just after 6:30 a.m., scaling the metal tree structure and attached with harnesses to keep them from falling. They slowly (slowly… slowly…) made their way down, level by level.
I spent about four 90-minute spans of time at the mall: 6:15 – 7:45 a.m., 10:15 – 11:45 a.m., 2 – 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 – 8 p.m. Setting up my camera on a tripod, I configured it to shoot one frame every 10 seconds. The completed time lapse included more than 1,600 images, each lasting for 2 frames of a 30-frame-per-second sequence. Each second of the time lapse, then, had 15 images.
Flip through the photos to see a cross section of the total, and watch the video below to see the whole thing.
Baltimore neighborhoods
Baltimore street photographers
Year in review
Freddie Gray: protests, aftermath
24 hours with...
A. Aubrey Bodine
Viewing Baltimore from above