Christmas decorations around the park

On our bicycle ride the other day, we specifically looked for how people have decorated for Christmas here:

A stone turtle with reindeer antler headband!

Santa hats on the cactus

More Santa hats on cactus, and other yard decorations

Golf cart decorations - the wrapped package was part of the decoration, as well as the wreath, and you may be able to see the 'snow' on the fenders.

Extra large lights around the roof -- I don't know if they light up or not!

Well, this one isn't decorated specifically for Christmas, but the red is very festive!

This isn't decorated for Christmas either, but it is a pretty red and green. This is a metal cactus, not a real one.

 

Some of the blocks in Venture Out have multiple homes with the same decoration -- this street has reindeer heads made from palm tree pieces...

 

... here's a closeup - I don't know what the part of the palm tree that the decoration is made from is called -- I don't think it is the "frond".

 

Reindeer heads on a citrus tree

Closeup of the reindeer head on the citrus tree

One more house on that particular block that had the reindeer head. On our block, several houses have a wooden drummer boy. I think that when the occupants of a block are trying to win the decoration award, the whole block will try to have the same decoration, and then folks will use them in following years too. It makes the block look cohesive.

We had seen this yard when we were looking at Christmas lights, but pictures just don't do it justice. They have 10-12 tables of Christmas nativity sets, village scenes, just lots and lots of stuff! The couple happened to be outside when we stopped to take a picture so we got to chat with them for a few minutes (at a careful social distance, of course!).

I think that this yard won first place (for a corner lot) this year.

Carl took a picture of our lot with the "night vision" setting on his camera (and supporting the camera on a railing across the street to minimize blur). It is neat how it got the lights in the palm tree to the right of our lot (those are from the "Sparkle Magic" light from our lot), the moving lights on the side of Gracie, and the down light on the flag pole (lighting the flag at night). The string of colored lights in the front windshield look like a line of white.

We also got the spotting scope out last night and were able to get a nice view of Saturn and Jupiter. We had to zoom it in all the way to get a good clear view of them, and then they moved out of the field of view of the telescope very quickly with the earth's rotation. But it was neat to see them!