Christmas Leaves Slowly

I cannot stand to see Christmas trees laying empty and dead on the curb.  It bums me out.  Lots of people put out their trees right after the big day or right after New Year.  How can they just put it out there like that?  It was covered in lights and sparkly things for a month and now it's just a fire hazard in the snow and mud.  That's why we hang on to ours until the night before the garbage day that first week of January.  That was last night.

The kiddos came home with big plans for playing Xbox yesterday afternoon.  But our window of time with everybody home, was slim so they had to put that off while we took the tree down.

I'll confess that none of our Christmas traditions are a piece of cake.  We have devised all kinds of ways over the years to complicate the entire process.  For example, we don't just take the ornaments down.  No sir.  After the hooks are removed they all get individually wrapped in paper and then placed in a storage can.  If they are considered extra special, then they go in the can marked "First".  The super duper extra special ones go right on top of the "First" can so they go on tree first.  All of this has been refined over the years so we don't even think about how ridiculous it probably all is.

When we took down my mom's tree on New Year's Day, we got the whole thing done in five commercial breaks during The Twilight Zone marathon.  That included bringing down the boxes from the attic, filling them with everything (including the tree) and returning the boxes.  The sixth break had us rearranging the furniture back.  Then it was time for dessert.

Only the tree is down at this point.  Everything else is tucked hither and tither about the house.  It's going to take a week to herd it all in.  Then the boxes will sit in the upstairs hallway for an overly long period before they finally get hauled up to the attic.

Then it will be time for Easter.