Loved it in TV when temp. dropped into the 50f- 60f range.
Golf courses were near empty as the all year rounders mostly wouldn't leave their house.
I had a great pal for many years who was so proud of being an ex-Marine.
Used to bang on his door when temp. dropped, and shout, "are the Marines playing today?"
Can't put the exact reply, but it fell into the 'Go Forth and Multiply' category!
Still miss him.

I think winter this year is on a Tuesday!

As we like to say, "Jacksonville is a great place to be from"! No desire to return, but am happy we own the farm.

Cold Temps
 

We moved from San Diego to The Villages 4 years ago. Winters are better than San Diego, summers are worse, fall and spring are about equal. The Villages beats the cost of living in San Diego hands down. When we moved here in October, the air conditioner ran every day. We held our breaths and waited for the electric bill. In San Diego with the thermostat set to 82°, the bill could be $400. The bill was $79 and the thermostat was set at 77°!

The rule here is: layers in the winter. It may freeze at night for 3 days in a row, but the daytime temps rise to the 50°. So far, we’ve never had an ice storm here. All I’ve ever experienced is random nights of frost Dec - Feb. No more than 8 nights like that and that’s the total for Dec. ‘22 - Feb. ‘23. (I pay attention because I have some plants that hate frost. Right now the pineapples are in our enclosed lanai. They don’t like 50°. BTW, try growing pineapples from the cut off tops of store bought fruit in Illinois.)

Run heater in morning and a/c in the afternoon in car. That's typical for winter in Florida. Been here since May 1953. We got to Miami and expected to see palm trees like on post cards showing the coconut palms. They don't grow this far north.

If it’s that warm in Illinois in December then that’s the anomaly and not mid-central Florida in the winter!

Very much depends upon what activities you like to do. If you imagined that you'd be sitting by a swimming pool everyday in December-March, you'd be disappointed in the weather in Central Florida.
However, if you play pickleball, the cooler weather is a blessing.

Many times I've left the house on a "cold" morning for a walk, only to realize after a few blocks of warming up that I was a tad overdressed.

It seems like there aren't more than a handful of days through the winter months here that are just so miserable I wouldn't go out even for a walk. In fact, when those days are forecast, I sometimes get the giddy feeling I used to get when a big snowstorm was expected up north, and a little bit of me is happy that I can get a "rest day". No golf, no pickleball, no walk. Just laze around the house and do puzzles or something.

ps. I just checked the weather in my old 'hood up north. 17F. I don't miss that a bit.

Actually they are pretty close in departure from the average. The average low in Edwardsville for December is 28F and the average low in The Villages for December is 51F. So, we were about 10F below average and Edwardsville was about 13F above average for that morning.

You Decide
 

Factual December temps for the last 4 years taken near Santo Domingo.

Thanks for the laugh this morning (though it's true) :mademyday:

Fred

We get a couple of weeks of winter in December and January. Deal with it.

Why did you promise him that? Where did you get your information that it is a "warm and toasty" place? Florida ranges between a humid subtropic, to a true tropic climate, depending on what part of the state you're in.

Central Florida is a humid sub-tropic and as such it can often get into the 40s on winter nights, and have winter days when it never leaves the upper 50's. On rare occasions, temperatures can dip below freezing but those are few and far between, and might happen one or two days out of the entire year, if at all.

These are things you'd know, if you had checked Wikipedia, or done a simple google search for Florida climate information. You can even check the Orlando wikipedia entry, which brings you a little closer (albeit an hour south of) to us for detail. You'll find that in December, January, and February, it is common to have minimum day-time temps in the low 50's. It's also common to have maximum daytime temps in the low 70's, for the same months.

Mean minimums (which would be night-time) during December, January, and February, are commonly just above freezing and don't even hit 40.

There've been extremes outside these "mean" measurements - record low of 18 in December in Orlando, and record high of 103 one September.

In general though, with the exceptions of the extreme highs and lows and seasonal changes, the greater Orlando area (including the Villages, which is just north) should expect daytime temps to range from the low 70's to the low 90's for most of the year.

No. The lowest average temperature for The Villages is in January and is 47F.

My coldest Christmas ever was last year here in TV. 24 degrees at 7:00 a.m. We had arrived here from SoCal just a month earlier. I walked outside just to experience it because growing up in SoCal I had never had a Christmas morning colder than the 50s-60s. It was definitely not what I was expecting when we moved here. My husband on the other hand grew up in MI so 24 was not new to him, but after 46 years in SoCal he definitely was no longer used to temps that low. We were at Disney for 2 nights earlier this week when temps were in the 40s, and we were both frickin’ freezing. LOL!

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