As I am a member of an a cappella group on campus, each year we get the opportunity to perform as a group at City Center's Hollydazzle, which is a Christmas festival for the whole Newport News community. This in and of itself amazes me, since I am from Northern Virginia and such festivals are not a commonplace thing in the NoVA community.
My a cappella group shared a cleared-out store space to use as a greenroom in between performances. We shared this space with CNU's other a cappella groups that were performing, but also the other performers hired for Hollydazzle. Among these were a small group of people who dressed in bright, shiny costumes and walked around City Center on stilts. One time when I was entering the greenroom during our time there, one of the stilt-walkers was exiting, and as I walked into the store I passed through a pair of toddlers, who stared agape at the woman on stilts as if they had never seen anything like it before. It's likely that they simply hadn't seen anything like it before. They both were stopped in their tracks, toys in hand, amazed and fixated on the stilt-walker as if nothing else mattered in all of Hollydazzle.
These two little ones greatly inspired me in their abject wonder - I want to live in this way! Pinterest quotes say "May we never lose our wonder," but in the flowery language the meaning of wonder gets lost. The small folks of Hollydazzle that day helped me redefine it: to be completely fixated, to stand in awe, to allow the newness of something to wash over me and overwhelm me to the point of sheer captivation.
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