Christmas past

As you may know if you follow this blog, and if you do maybe it's time to stop reading and seek gainful employment, we've recently finished a major kitchen remodel. The kind that makes me wonder how we lived with the old, small, inefficient kitchen so long. The kind that makes me wonder how many lifetimes I'll need to pay for it.

In the video above you can see the new peninsula we added. Well, you'd see it if it weren't covered with the mélange of Christmas ornaments that were carefully taken off the tree, and are now waiting to be boxed up and shoved back on the top shelf of the garage where they'll live until next year, neighbor to the Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations.

It's a lot of ornaments. But it was a big tree.

As I've written about here, I have mixed feelings about packing up the holiday. I like the joy and spirit of the season, but then I can only take so much joy and spirit. It's a short ride from "Merry Christmas" to "Bah-humbug."

The good news is every time this ritual is officially over, I feel like the slate is clean once again and I can start the new year in earnest, breaking resolutions then promising to start them for real the following week.

The beauty of it is I only have to do this fifty times. Then it's Christmas all over again.

De-Christmafied

Not so merry now, is it?

It's been twelve days since Christmas, and on the twelfth day my true love gave to me a house de-Christmafied. The wreaths are down, the ornaments have been boxed and put away until next year. And the tree has been kicked to the curb.

As I wrote about here a couple years ago, I've always had kind of a love/hate relationship with our Christmas tree. On one antler, I love the fun, hopeful and joyous spirit it brings to the house during the season.

On the other, I always see it taking the house down in flames.

I'm always sad to see the holidays end, but this time it was less of an ending and more an act of mercy. Our tree stopped drinking water about the third day we had it, and it was dry to the touch and slightly brown. Plus the needles had started to fall all over the place. And since Santa didn't bring me a new vacuum, I wasn't particularly excited about that development.

That's not our tree in the picture, but it may as well be. It's one of the many you'll see lining the curbs if you drive down my block today. All ghosts of Christmas past, they're waiting for the city trucks to come by tomorrow morning starting at 6:30 to pick them up.

There is of course still the matter of the lights that decorate the exterior of the house. The further away from Christmas we get, the fewer houses still have their lights on at night. We happen to be one of those houses. But the lights don't have a shelf life like the tree does, so they're always the final act in the de-Christmafying process.

So tomorrow, when the recycling truck driver takes the tree
Then gives his team a whistle
They'll fly past the homes like the down of a thistle
And I'm sure I'll hear him say as he drives until night
Merry Christmas to all, let's get this trash out of sight.