I didn't know it at the time, but this photo ended up being the last photo I ever took of Cinderella's Castle while lit up in the Christmas Dream Lights. 

The night that I captured the photo you see above, I had met up with two local photographers and we enjoyed hanging out together and taking photos around the Magic Kingdom. We started out in Fantasyland and slowly made our way to the front of Cinderella's Castle. We wanted to arrive there so that most of the crowd would be gone by the time we made it there. 

We then took countless photos in front of the castle, capturing all the different colors they lit the castle up with. Some photos included the Partners statue, some were looking down the walkway to Tomorrowland. 

We then made our way down Mainstreet USA. Just as we had done all night, we took our time while enjoying the atmosphere and  having the area mostly to ourselves. There were still other people in the park, but they were few and far between, and were mostly guests who had enjoyed a late dinner at Be Our Guest.  

The very last photo I took on this night is the one up above. After taking this photo, the three of us walked out of the Magic Kingdom without anyone else around. It's a very strange experience doing that, but is certainly one I'd enjoy doing again. 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, this is the last photo I ever took of the castle lit up like this. This photo is from 2019. The next year they didn't put the lights up and switched to using projections. I believe at the time they made this switch as we were still in the pandemic in 2020 and they didn't have the labor to put all the lights up. But maybe it was something that was coming anyway. The new  projections do look absolutely amazing, but they are not as magical as these lights are.

I now believe that we will never see those beautiful lights again. The reason I believe that is because of what they did for Christmas in 2022. They had the projections again, which was expected. However, this year they added the Anniversary lighting to the rotation of the four different Christmas projections. They added it so people who only made one visit to the park could see how the castle usually looks during the anniversary. That's actually a very good idea, and is not one they could do with the Christmas lights. So, I believe going forward they will keep the projections, and then they can always rotate in the current regular lighting. Now I just hope they add a projection that looks like this does. 

Once I realized all of that, it made me realize that this was indeed, the last photo I ever took of Cinderella's Castle Dream Lights.  

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