That picture is deceiving, isn't it. I mean, come on! Who has just one tub of decorations? I cannot relate to that. Our Christmas decorations take up a third of our attic. Plus there's the tree box and two totes we keep stored in the furnace room for the Browns tree for the man cave. We love to decorate for Christmas but the undecorating is, well, excruciating! That once beautiful spot in our living room is now a shimmering reminder that the Christmas season is over, as of yesterday actually. January 5th marks the 12th Day of Christmas. That makes today National Take Down The Tree Day. Undecorating, as with decorating in the first place, prompts the discussion about which ornaments are no longer used and should be boxed together for a garage sale to be held later. Ultimately we have no desire to go through that sorting process and another year goes with no progress towards pairing down this over flow of sparkly excess.
Hopefully those of you who prefer a live tree have long since removed that fire hazard from your home and cleaned up those pesky pine needles. One can only take that pine fresh scent for so long. Besides you could live there for 100 years and still find pine needles left behind from your first live tree.
Some people will leave their artificial tree in place and just rotate in the Valentine decorations followed by St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Memorial Day and so on through out the year. I just can't imagine that. We'd have to construct a new wing to the house just for holiday decoration storage.
I think this weekend we'll start the process of putting Christmas away but not before one last evening of turning on the tree lights, playing some Christmas music and soaking up that last ounce of Christmas, tucking it away until mid-November when we start it all over again.