Each New Day

With all the talk of recycling, I remembered the opportunity to recycle old Christmas lights. Yesterday as we took ours down, I thought about this. I wondered if there was anywhere local that would recycle them. I don’t think so, but I know that IKEA is recycling CFL lights . HolidayLEDs is recycling old Christmas lights that are mailed to them now through Jan. 31. These are some great ways to help yourself and your world.

We took down our Christmas lights yesterday. I know many people find this to be such a chore that they would just as soon leave them up year round. The folks promoting LED lights say “go ahead!” The LED Christmas lights are so energy efficient that running 2000 LED lights eight hours a day for a year would cost about $50! What a way to decorate any time of the year!

Trees and/or shrubs wrapped in white lights look great around decks, patios and porches. Or maybe you have wedding plans coming up. LED lights would add a wonderfully festive touch to the occasion. Birthday parties and Fourth of July barbecues would be the perfect place for outdoor lighting. So don’t worry about taking down those LED holiday lights!

Last week when I mentioned to my neighbor that we were going to walk around that evening and look at the Christmas lights in the neighborhood, she said to be sure and go around the corner to see the guy that had apparently put 7200 lights around his tree in the front yard.

We walked around the block first thing and were amazed at how bright it was. We could definitely see the tree we thought we should head towards. It was a large tree in the front yard with the trunk completely covered in green lights. My daughter really liked this display and took a couple of shots of it. We could not decide if this or the candycane tree were our favorites.

I’ve had a blog here at blog.com for about a year now. I’ve never been able to upload photos here directly and never really understood why. I have been loading them onto flickr and getting the code to paste in here. But today I took a couple of minutes to figure out what I needed to do to directly upload a photo here. It seriously took about two minutes. I simply had to allow pop ups from editor at blog.com. It was that easy! The first time I did it, it was HUGE, so I just went back and checked the thumbnail size to change it to the size I wanted. So here is a photo of one of our neighbors Christmas light displays.