St. Lucia Festival of Lights  | Chicago

The festival of St. Lucia is a celebration of lights prevailing over the darkest time of the year. Start at the Swedish American Museum, 5211 N. Clark, for the annual candlelit, carol-filled procession down Clark Street. Afterwards, the museum hosts singing, family entertainment and treats. The procession is free; admission to the museum is $1 or a canned food item to benefit the Care For Real food pantry. There will also be a special St. Lucia service down the street at Ebenezer Lutheran Church starting at 7:00 p.m.

Search for gnomes in the Children's Garden using your best "I Spy" skills. Checklist provided.

Visitors can walk inside the two-story silo and turn the crank of a silage machine, watching "corn plants" delivered to the top of the silo. Plus, learn about the history of silos and silage, build miniature silos with building blocks simulating wood, brick and metal and much more.

Bring your budding naturalist to Irons Oaks to explore the natural world together.  Each session a different natural topic is explored with activities, stories, games, or an art project. Dec. 13: Winter Birds; Jan. 23: Snow Fun; Feb. 13: Animal Tracks.

See a toy so amazing, so unbelievable, it has the power to transform into anything you want it to be. Enter a world where imagination rules, and ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Build a snow fort, throw snowballs, dress up a snowman and ice skate - all inside.
The brand new "ice" rink has more space to skate in your socks.

A new traveling exhibit created by Children's Museum of Pittsburgh that links familiar childhood objects to a process of manufacturing that combines people, ideas and technology. Inspired by the factory tour segments from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the exhibit offers hands-on activities using real factory tools and machines to create objects including crayons, a baseball bat and a matchbox car, just to name a few.

Kids enter artist Gino Severini's interpretation of trains by role-playing engineer, passenger or conductor in a child-size train and look for objects in an eight-foot wide "hidden pictures" mural of artist Don Stewart's "Steam Train."  Plus, enjoy specially designed wooden train tables and a huge new interactive crane.

The exhibit features the illustrations of W. W. Denslow, a Chicago resident whose famous illustrations helped to inspire the design of the classic 1939 MGM film starring Judy Garland. The bright and colorful exhibit provides a variety of learning opportunities and hands-on activities within a three-dimensional representation of Denslow's distinctive illustrations.

Discover how sounds make music, and how music makes you feel, with activities like making melodies on bolt- and wrench-a-phones, using soft sculpture pegs to make a music box, blowing air over a reed, moving musical notes on a staff, beating percussion instruments, and creating an artistic masterpiece that reflects how music makes you feel