With Thanksgiving past along with Black Friday, the Christmas holiday is beginning and many places are already decorating for the upcoming day. Recently I visited a newly renovated park in Omaha, NE, the Gene Leahy Mall. Formerly the place had a few lagoons, but those have been filled in with new landscaping and different design and now sports and Christmas decorations and other accoutrements for the upcoming holiday.
The park is much more family friendly these days with many folk coming out to view the decorations and take photos, either by themselves or with a professional photographer in tow to capture this year’s memories to cherish later. And the magical effect of the decorations as the sun began to set made the area almost magical.
And it’s always challenging to photograph the fading light and the Christmas light together, trying to find that fight balance of ambient and artificial light to create a photo that has a little impact and hopefully catches a viewer’s eye.
I live in the Siouxland area that encompasses a wide swatch of land in northwest Iowa, northeastern Nebraska and southeastern South Dakota. The people that inhabit this area are generous folk and your basic honest, Midwestern people you like to have as neighbors. I explore the area and share observations, mostly photographic, sometimes through video, and and short text. All images and video are copyrighted material of the author.
Jerry Mennenga, Sioux City, Iowa
jerrylmennenga@yahoo.com
lostinsiouxland 
Very nice and that is one heck of a tree!
Thank you. It was fun to check it out and not yet, too cold to do so.