ready for Christmas.

Good morning.
As usual, I'm stuffed from Thanksgiving and the leftovers the day after.  But we did power walk twice yesterday, so that's a good restart.   :-)
We have 2 trees in the front yard. The one on the left is an African Sumac, and the one on the right is a Southern Live Oak. They are both evergreen and keep most of their leaves all winter.  The Oak even has acorns.

But as I found out, the oak doesn't like to be decorated for Christmas....

The interior of the tree is filled with short sharp twiggy branch thingies that really tear at you. But I got it done. Obviously I need to wear a long sleeve shirt next year. Also, I discovered that decorating trees in brilliant sunshine is very difficult. You can't tell where you've already put lights. It was much easier back in cloudy dreary Michigan.. :-)
I also wanted to do each bush with a different color. I had to run to nearly a dozen different stores to find colors other than green, red and blue.
But here's the end result with about 4000 lights.........

The lighted globes along the sidewalk aren't bushes, but chicken wire I bent into globes and covered with lights. We're not allowed to put plants that close to the foundation and I thought it needed something there for Christmas.  If you click on the last pic, you'll see our steel door lighted up. Craig wired lights to the inside of the door. Gives the door a real neat effect.
It's really nice to be able to put lights up any day I want and in nice weather.   :-)   It reached a high of 62 yesterday.  I did finally turn the heat on as the last few evening have been very cold.  Upper 30's and the temp inside had dropped below 70. A little too chilly for us in the morning. But it is almost Dec.   :-)
We did put up some decorations inside, but not much. We have a small 3 ft tree I'll probably decorate today. We're not big on decorations, but love all the lights.
It's now been just over 3 months since we retired. Still lovin it!   :-)