Residents lift dreams towards sky; Mason Dixon Welcomes Annual Lights Festival

A scene plucked right out of the storyline of Disney’s Tangled, the annual Lights Festival celebrates the ability to express your fears, hopes, and dreams, and release them from your mind and into the sky.

As summer came to an end, the Mason Dixon, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. community came together to listen to music, eat spectacular food from food trucks, and release their lanterns.

This life changing, one of a kind experience was shared by our own students intrigued to be a part of the jamboree.

Jamie Teague and Kayla Nowacki both attended the event for the first time with high expectations that were exceeded.

Teague explained, “My group of friends were messaging about it and we decided we wanted to see what it was all about.”

After receiving their lanterns Teague began to write her message, “We wrote our wishes, dreams, what we wanted, adventure, and we wanted to keep it positive and of course money.”

The night was jammed packed with bands and food, but Teague’s favorite memory of the event was, “When we were lighting the lanterns, but it was really windy so it was kind of a disaster.”

Before the grand lighting fest Teague states, “There were bands that switched on and off and the bands toured with the event that goes across the United States.”

Teague’s final words on the event were, “It was just a really great experience to be able to enjoy an event like that.”

Not only did Teague enjoy a one of a kind experience, Sarah Hendrickson and Katherine Miller also attended a lights festival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Both lantern release festivales shared similarities, Hendrickson explained, “It’s basically like a festival, but at night when it’s completely dark, there’s about 1,000 lanterns that are released at once.”

After contemplating on what to scribe on her lantern, Hendrickson stated she wrote, “I decided to write about myself and the year I was graduating, golf, the colleges I hope to get accepted to.”

Miller also attended with Hendrickson after noticing an advertisement on Facebook.

Miller shared that, “I wrote a Dierks Bentley quote from his song ‘I Hold On’ saying, ‘I hold onto the things I believe in, my faith, our love, our freedom.”

Miller also said that her favorite part was the release of the lanterns because it “reminded her of the scene in the movie Tangled.”

Before the lanterns were released, Miller and Hendrickson revealed that they both delved into the food available from Island Noodles.