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| Click to enlarge. |
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| Two days after Christmas, I visited the Spruce Ridge reindeer farm in Albrightsville, PA. |
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| I am happy to report that the reindeer are in good shape and resting peacefully. |
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| And fully recovered from any magical journeys they may have taken recently. |
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| This is a dawn redwood tree. Isn't it pretty? It has an interesting history. In 1941, a tree genus was described from fossils that were around 5 million years old. A few years later, small populations of that fossil tree were found alive in central China. It was not extinct, just very rare. People call it a living fossil. Its common name, dawn redwood, refers to its early fossil record. |
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| In 1951, dawn redwoods became commercially available in the United States. They have since been planted widely. There are two on my suburban New Jersey street. I noticed this one in a nearby park. |
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| The tree has male and female cones. These are female, or seed-bearing cones. |
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| These are male, pollen-bearing cones. Click to enlarge. |
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| Although the dawn redwood is a conifer with needles and cones, it is not an evergreen. It sheds its needles in autumn and grows new ones in spring. So, yes, it has a nice Christmas tree shape, but it won't be green for the holidays. |
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| Just nutcrackers today. Click to enlarge. |
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| Do you know what goes Oh Oh Oh? |
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| Um, no. |
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| Santa Claus walking backwards! |
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| Resting nutcracker face. |
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| Santa Claus is coming anyway. |
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| The annual feast of holiday lawn pumpkins is on! |
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| Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Autumn decorations... all tasty. |
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| These are for me, right? Click to enlarge. |
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| Well, maybe just a nibble. |
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| And they have seeds inside! Gotta love the holidays! |
