If you live in the Denver area, make sure you visit zoo lights at the Denver Zoo.  It is a great family tradition and if you bundle the kids up well enough, they won’t complain about being cold!  Oh, and make sure you bring your camera with CHARGED batteries, or else you’ll end up with one crappy picture, like the one I took.We made the mistake of going on a Saturday night(what was I thinking?  I homeschool!  We could go ANY night!).  It was really cold and I thought it wouldn’t be busy.  It. was. packed.   But beautiful.  We paid $24 dollars for our family of 4.  Yes, is a lot, but much less than a movie and we actually interacted and got to see some animals!

Emily immediately  noticed the zoo had changed a ton of their lights over to LEDs.  According to their website, 90% of the lights are LED and the rest are wind powered.  Mike and i were discussing how much more profit they are getting this year because their power bills must have been *MASSIVE*.  We made the switch this year from our 13 year old lights that we bought(and seemed like we paid a fortune for)in college to LEDs from Costco(cheapest place to get them)when my husband had spent over an hour trying to figure out which bulb was burnt out.  After much swearing, he agreed “it was time”.  On the outside of the house, we put up 3-4 strands of energy hogging C7 bulbs that twinkle.  I have a soft spot for twinkle bulbs as they are the ones we had on our tree during my childhood.  Don’t mistake “twinkle” for “blinking” either.  On my twinkle bulbs, each bulb is controlled by an individual twinkle controller which makes it turn on and off independantly of the others.  It is really very pretty.  But I do shutter to think of the electric bill this month.  I turned down the heater at night a couple more degrees in order to try and offset the cost of running the lights.