After my tour around the Florida Everglades in late November, I stayed in Florida a few more nights, but didn’t do anything terribly exciting.  Mostly I just stopped to rest in state parks on my way back to Nashville for the Thanksgiving holiday.  In fact, I pretty much ran straight through the last 20 hours of the trip back, only stopping for naps at truck stops when I needed a break, and arrived back at 4:30am.  Once I was there I was in no particular hurry to leave again, so stayed through until Christmas.

I haven’t had a true American Thanksgiving, or a Christmas with relatives, in years, so I had a lot of fun looking at all the decorations, helping to decorate the house, doing some gift shopping, and just generally hanging out.  I won’t go into all the details, but there were a few things I thought I’d share.

Perhaps most importantly, Lucy hadn’t had her picture taken with Santa yet, so we took her to the pet shop to have it done!  Firstly, this is a Beagle-Rottweiler cross, so imagine the energy and attitude of a big dog in a small dog’s neurotic body (I’ve seen this before, and they’re high maintenance!).  Just getting there was a challenge, and I just hoped it wouldn’t end in tears… especially mine.

But oddly, as soon as she met Santa, she was instantly fascinated with him, so sat quietly and was no trouble at all.  Huh.  You never know.

We made lots of Christmas cookies to be shipped off to relatives and taken to workplaces, but for some reason I failed to take a picture of the finished cookies… so here I am in the process of making snickerdoodles.  I like snickerdoodles.

Christmas day itself was nice and relaxing, with good food, and fun gifts, and a bit of Lego building on the side.  Did you know that they make Lego kits for famous buildings now?  They do.

I was very impressed with the number of houses that put up Christmas lights here, and it was lovely to see.  Australians don’t seem to decorate as much, perhaps because Christmas falls in summer there when the days are long, so there’s less time to see the lights… maybe?  About two weeks before Christmas I decided that I wanted to see the lights at Cheekwood, an historic mansion and 55 acres of gardens just south of Nashville.  The night I went happened to be the coldest of the season so far, so I was a bit freezing as I walked around, but it was beautiful!  So many lights everywhere!

There were forests of trees wrapped in lights!

At first I thought that they might have used some type of web covered with lights that could be quickly and easily wrapped around all these trees.  But no, each tree was wrapped in many strings consisting of thousands of lights.  It mist have taken ages to do all of this, but the effect was breathtaking!

I walked over rivers and through the woods, absolutely freezing, and it just went on an on for acres…

I finally got quite cold and went inside the mansion house to warm up, only to find that there were decorations everywhere there too, and multiple Christmas trees decorating different rooms.

Looking out from the side veranda I saw… glowing balls of lights.  Ok, not traditional, but… interesting…

I wandered down past the carriage house and met Holly and Jolly the reindeer, near Santa’s workshop.  Obviously they were resting up for the big night ahead… got to conserve energy for that..

There were toy train tracks circling through the trees, with multiple trains rushing by with toys, moving to some, oddly, very ominous and non-Christmassy music..?  There was also a garden of lights, filled with plant shapes made in Christmas lights, and really rather pretty.  Unfortunately, I was plagued with a random stranger at that time that kept stepping in front of me and looking around blankly whenever I tried to take a picture.  So I won’t bother showing you my five or six pictures of Blank Dude standing in front of and obscuring the pretty lights.  There was plenty more to see.  I think these trees were supposed to be candy canes, but I just kept thinking that the Cat in the Hat would jump out soon..

It was somewhere about here that I tried to take a rare selfie, and suddenly realized why everyone was looking at me a bit strangely as I wandered around.  The hood on my new winter coat was bigger than I realized, and although warm, was making me look a bit like Kenny from South Park. Hm.

Soon after, I discovered gold in the form of a food truck selling hot mulled cider, and freaked them out slightly by ordering it from within the confines of my Kenny hood.  Hee hee hee…  Mmmm… warm and cidery.

With warm cup in hand, I completed my tour of the gardens, and was slightly enchanted by this romantic bench under the lit dogwood trees.  What a lovely place.

I completed the circuit, and was sad to leave such a beautiful place. I exited through the gift shop (it was a nice gift shop), and gratefully cranked up the heater in my truck for the drive home.

The next weekend I was invited by a friend to visit an underground cavern in Louisville, Kentucky that’s decorated with Christmas lights each year.  It’s called the Lights Under Louisville in the Louisville Mega Cavern, if you’d like to look it up.  So I drove up for the day and checked it out.  It would seem that the line to get in can be very long, because they had all sorts of extra loops and contingencies set up to accommodate long lines of cars, but we really didn’t have much of a wait at all, perhaps because we went fairly early.  Everyone turns their lights off and creeps through the tunnels.  It’s really quite different from anything I’ve seen before.

I took quite a few pictures, but unfortunately most of them didn’t come out very well.  Or perhaps that’s fortunate, because there was a lot of flashing and blinking going on!  Even my friend said that the displays this year were a bit more garish than they usually are.  And we did find the music a bit easier to take with the windows rolled up…  But still, there was enough that was pretty and interesting about the place to make me glad that I was there to see it.  I believe this was supposed to be snow falling and covering the ground, which was rather nice.

An the 12 days of Christmas weren’t flashing, and the song was playing as we drove though, so that was pretty also.

I was a bit confused by the tank launching shells across our path… until I saw the sign in front of it and remembered that Fort Knox is nearby.  So Merry Christmas to the soldiers too, in tanks or otherwise!

I enjoyed my visit to Louisville, but back down in Nashville I found myself getting a bit restless.  After Christmas it would be time to move on again.  If there’s anything that disappointed me about the holidays back in the US, it’s that I really was hoping for a White Christmas, and instead it was just Wet.  Ah well.  I’ll be heading north again by the end of January, and I’m sure I’ll find more than enough snow there then!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night…