January 04th, 2024

Way back about seven years ago, on December 15, 2016 (yes I actually looked it up to be sure) I did a blogpost that started with the following sentence:  "It's hard to decorate a palm tree".  Now here it is, a bit more than 7 years down the road and a lot of things have changed.  Still one thing remains the same, it's still had to decorate a palm tree.  But that hasn't stopped people from trying!

After a two year break, finally, this year the Arboretum was decked out for Christmas again! YAYAYAYAYAY!  One year they didn't go it because of that whole pesky pandemic thing and not wanting to encourage people to "congregate" and thereby sharing the contagion.  The next year was after our biggest ever hurricane, Ian, and our city arborist (we have a city arborist??) declared that the green growing stuff was far too fragile following the storm to risk decorating.   Bummer.

While we understood, of course we did, we couldn't not help but be disappointed.  Walking through the absolute chaos of Christmas Decorations in that park every year has become one of our favourite Florida Christmas Traditions.  Naturally, after that long two year sabbatical, it was so exciting to see the decorations finally go up again!  YAYAYAYAYAY!

We did what we always do and walked through twice, once in the day time and once at night.  And something we noticed this time was that while some displays were familiar, others were brand new.  I don't know if it was new people decorating this year or the same good folks with new ideas.  I suppose the reason doesn't matter, it was great fun.

Somehow, as much as we were looking forward to the walk through the park, with one thing or another, we didn't get around to actually getting our fannies there until just a couple of days before Christmas.    The daytime walk was grey and windy and our night walk through got cut short when it unexpectedly began to rain. Still we went, we enjoyed the heck out of it and I got a few photos.

The two pictures at the top of the page are of the same tree, one in light the other, obviously at night.  The decorators, cleverly wrapped the trunk of the very tall palm in coloured water proof wrapping before winding the lights around.  Very Effective!

Here is another example of how different the displays look, day to night.  I offer you the traditional Christmas Flamingos (what?  You don't have flamingos?  Awwww I'm sorry)​

In the first one of course the large lit up flamingo is the star.  In the second one the flamingo with lights is practically invisible and it's those little plastic lawn ornament flamingos that take center stage.  

It's all very fun and creative and artsy and traditional and old fashioned and new fashioned and I just can't seem to get enough of it.

Here's a few of my favourites from this year:

Hopefully nothing will prevent the Christmas Lights from going up next year and maybe, just maybe, next year I will do what I keep promising myself I'm going to do.  Maybe next year I will sign up to be a decorator and be assigned my own tree!  Gosh I hope it's Not a Palm Tree! Those things are buggers to decorate!

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