Families enjoy the big sleigh at Lubbock’s Winter Wonderland at Vintage Township. (Texas Highways photo/Kevin Stillman)

Tomorrow it will officially be December (though I could have sworn it came a few days earlier judging from how much Christmas music I’ve heard already), and cities across the state are ready to spread the holiday cheer with a huge weekend of Christmas festivals and parades. Check out the list below for a small selection of events—or you can find more using the event search tool.

While you’re out and about at holiday events this year, we’d love to see what fun you find! Just share your favorite holiday photos with us on Instagram by tagging your pictures with #TxHwysHolidays. Your pictures will then show up on a real-time slideshow we’ll post next week at TexasHighways.com.

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Here are just a few of this weekend’s offerings to get you started:

• Alvin: Home for the Holidays Christmas Festival, Dec. 1
• Athens: Holiday on the Square, Dec. 1
• Austin: Chuy’s Christmas Parade and the Holiday Sing-Along and Downtown Stroll, Dec. 1
• Bellville: A Small-Town Christmas, Nov. 30-Dec. 1
• Corpus Christi: Harbor Lights Festival, Dec. 1
• Galveston: Dickens on the Strand, Dec. 1-2
• Huntsville: Huntsville for the Holidays (several events on Dec. 1)
• Lampasas: Carol of Lights, Dec. 1
• Llano: Christmas Market Day, Lighted Christmas Parade and Home Tour, Dec. 1
• Monahans: Christmas and Chili Market, Dec. 1
• Quanah: Christmas Festival and Lighted Parade, Dec. 1
• Rockport: Rockport Tropical Christmas Festival, Dec. 1
• Rosenberg: Christmas in Rosenberg, Dec. 1
• San Antonio: Tamales! At Pearl–A Holiday Family Festival, Dec. 1
• South Padre Island: Christmas Lighted Boat Parade, Dec. 1

And some ongoing events through the end of the season:

• Burnet: Christmas Trail of Lights, Dec. 1-31
• Grapevine: North Pole Express and Christmas on Main, weekends through December
• Johnson City: Lights Spectacular, Hill Country Style, through Jan. 1
• Marble Falls: Walkway of Lights, through Jan. 1
• Midland: Christmas at the Mansion, Dec. 1-29
• Nacogdoches: Nine Flags Festival, through Dec. 8
• Wichita Falls: ElectriCritters (weekends until Dec. 22) and Fantasy of Lights (through Jan. 1)
• The Woodlands: Winter Wonderland and Woodlands Ice Rink, through Jan. 21

Move over, Cowboys Stadium—Texas has a new premier sports facility.

I know, I know. It’s not a fair comparison. Football will always have a special place in many Texans’ hearts. But the opening race this weekend at the new Circuit of the Americas, just southeast of Austin, definitely put the state on the Formula One map.

Admittedly, I went to the event knowing almost nothing about Formula One racing (aside from what I learned watching the documentary Senna a few months back). But I quickly found out a few things:

1. Bring ear protection–no joke, those engines are LOUD. It’s like part of the challenge is to defeat your earplugs.
2. The only way to tell who’s driving is to memorize who’s wearing what helmet, since multiple drivers on the same team may drive identical cars.
3. European guys all seem to have good hair. Go figure.

Our view from Turn 15–close enough to make you think, “I hope these guys know what they’re doing!”

I also expected more of a culture clash, with the casual come-as-you-are attitude of Austin rubbing wrong against the international jet-set crowd that follows F1. But it was soon apparent that this motorsports mecca becomes a world all its own, with about as many people wearing gear for their favorite Texas sports teams as there are others decked out in racing team colors or their national flags—and all of them in high spirits for this inaugural event.

The sprawling facilities can accommodate about 120,000 fans, or a crowd about the size of the whole city of Waco. By the good graces of someone in the family who won tickets, I had a seat in the third row of the “premium grandstand” on Turn 15—close enough to think maybe the drivers could see us as they slow down to take the curve.

For a seemingly exclusive event, I was pleasantly surprised to see how open and accessible the course was. Though the main grandstand and other premium seats are, naturally, closed off to most, there were general admission areas and other open spots for anyone to see the action from different angles. We moved around during some of the qualifying races just to see what there was to see, like the tower and the pedestrian bridge (which intentionally has any view of the track blocked off to keep people moving, although foot traffic bottlenecked here nonetheless). Swapping seats with friends at Turn 4 during some of the Ferrari and Porsche races on Saturday gave us a sweeping, colorful view of a winding stretch of the course.

The landmark tower of the Circuit of the Americas offers a bird’s-eye view of the track for a $35 fee.

Aside from the bridge bottlenecks, the only other place where we hit a snag was in the vendor areas. I was blissfully unaware of this on Saturday, when I managed to sneak in some food and avoided spending a single dollar at the track. On Sunday I went for a tasty chicken-in-a-waffle “taco” from the local Lucky J’s food truck, which was one of the shorter lines—and I still waited half an hour for food, then another half hour in a seaprate drink line.  Of course, the food and drinks were pricey, but not as much as I feared—most things seemed to be at least double what they’d cost outside the race (ever the pessimist, I was expecting quadruple). Meeting for lunch with friends at the race also became impossible since cell phone reception also was spotty to nonexistent, depending on the density of the crowd.

On the bright side, the weather was perfect (as long as you remembered to bring sunscreen), and the massive traffic delays feared before the race never materialized. Having attended other big events in Austin, such as the Austin City Limits Music Festival, I can say the logistics of getting in and out of Circuit of the Americas seemed to flow much more smoothly. The only traffic I encountered was the half-hour line waiting to get into the park-and-ride on Saturday. I was shocked to arrive at the park-and-ride at 9 a.m. on race day to find no line waiting to get in, so I was on a bus and at the track in about 30 minutes.

A view of the main grandstand area with the start/finish line, winners’ podium (in the middle with the checkered background), and pit area (bottom level) from a general admission area.

FanVision was my electronic “cheat sheet” for learning which driver was in which car.

At the main U.S. Grand Prix race on Sunday, the enthusiasm of the crowd reached its height. By then, I could spot the top four or five cars and got to see a couple of drivers overtake another on the curve in front of us. When Lewis Hamilton passed leader Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull car on Lap 42, just a couple of turns before our seats, you could feel the excitement ripple through the crowd. Then it was a game of people waving their hands to cheer Hamilton on every time he passed our section until he took the checkered flag.

We waited for the drivers to wave to the crowd on their victory lap before hustling for the exit. I dreaded the wait for the buses to take us back to the park-and-ride as about 117,000 people exited the grounds, but the lines kept moving and we were on a bus just 30 minutes after exiting the gates. Friends who left after the podium ceremony told me they waited about an hour. Not too bad, considering the scale of the event.

All in all, it seemed that the weekend went pretty smoothly for most folks. It will be interesting to see how much money came to Central Texas this weekend in the form of hotel rooms, meals and so on. I’m not sure if I’ll become a regular follower of Formula One racing, but now I certainly understand what all the F1 buzz is about.

Tearing up the floor at Wurstfest. If you can’t polka or two-step, just wait for the next Chicken Dance.

It’s become a yearly tradition for us to head down to Wurstfest in New Braunfels to share the joys of beer, sausage and polka with a few friends. Both the Longhorns and the Aggies had won football games when we went this Saturday, so the grounds were extra-packed with jovial fans–and a few in burnt orange even offering congratulations to those in maroon after their team beat No. 1 Alabama. Usually we’d park somewhere in town and trek on foot to the festival, but this time we caught the Wurst Wagen from the park-and-ride at the New Braunfels VFW, which was worth the money: $20 each for parking, admission, a ride to the front gate and some drink tickets, which saved us from standing in a couple of long lines at the event.

Once inside, we headed to the food pavilion for dinner. I went in with a strategy to try at least a little of a lot of different offerings: a Wurst-kabob (with five different types of sausage and a dinner roll), bratwurst hot dog, fried sauerkraut, fried pickles, fried cheesecake, and a kolache. These went fast among our group of six people, and when we were full, we agreed that we should come back next year to try the things we didn’t get around to (I’ll get you next time, apple pancakes…next time!).

Aside from the food area and the dance hall, another popular stop for a lot of people was the hat vendor. I think this photo of my new headgear is a perfect testament to the great time we had. Yes, the wings actually flap. Even the cashiers at Buc-ee’s on our way home were impressed.

It’s pretty rare that I’m drawn to an event on the strength of a poster alone, but then I saw this:

Lightning! A famous scientific rivalry! …Fictitious metal?

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked out the website. At the center of the event is a “fictional smack down”/stage show portraying Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, who personify the competing electrical technologies that emerged in the late 1800s. Add costumed entertainers, music, vendors, mad-science labs and a generous helping of ”steampunk” style (imagine combining Victorian Era technology with a Renaissance festival), and the ghost town of Unobtainium, Texas, crackles to life. The website predicts:  “Sparks will fly. Ray guns will be drawn. History will be re-made!” Even if it doesn’t sound like your kind of scene, you have to admire the earnest creativity behind the concept.

The imaginary town of Unobtainium can be found at Ball Farm in Dale, Texas, about 30 minutes southeast of Austin. Tesla and Edison are set to take shots at each other throughout the day before the actual showdown at 10 p.m. Saturday and again at 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit http://showdownatunobtainium.com.