We love the holidays.  Not just because we love giving and getting presents and celebrating the season, but we have two wonderful Milkshake Band shows that we’ve been doing for the past few years: Kennedy Krieger’s Festival of Trees and Midnite Noon at the Maryland Science Center.  Mikel and I also enjoy bringing in Santa to a few area malls.  These are early morning shows in mall open spaces and at the end of each performance, who arrives but the jolly old man himself and the look on kids’ faces is priceless.  I take extra glee in quizzing the mall Santas about the names of all the reindeer, which they inevitably can’t name, but this year I was happily surprised to find a Santa who knew them all, in fact, he went on tell us what he feeds them (hay)! I loved the Santa at Festival of Trees, who played right along with the audience as we tried to figure out which door he was behind in a mock game show we called “Where’s Santa?!”  Crazy fun. Both the band and duo shows are joyously messy extravaganzas of fake snow, candy canes, sleigh bells and holiday songs in between Milkshake classics.  This year, we added some songs off the new Got a Minute? CD, and of course we always delight in playing our original Christmas song “Christmas in Baltimore”.

The following pictures are from our annual Festival of Trees shows for Kennedy Krieger.  We’ve done these all-day shows for the past five years and we look forward to it so much now, it wouldn’t be the start of the season without this long but gratifying day.  Thanks to photographer friends Steve Parke, Bill Auth and Space Chapman for these great pictures!

Have a wonderful holiday season from all of us at Milkshake!  Our next and last show of the year is at the Maryland Science Center December 31st at 11 AM, where we’ll be bringing in the new year a little bit early.  Always great fun, and we hope to see you there!