It started last night. Here it is just 3 days after Thanksgiving and we feel like we are behind the ball in Christmas decorating. Main Street is decorated, the neighbors (it feels like ALL of them) have their Christmas lights on their houses, their fences, in their yards, up their garden sheds, on their swing sets, you name it.......people can figure out how to wrap some lights around it. If only they could figure out how to untangle their cords. Dave, being in A/V, and being Dave, is quite particular about cords and how they are wrapped (or not wrapped) and their entanglement. I see him eyeballing the cords throughout the neighborhood. I half expect to wake up in the middle of the night to find him gone and in the dark of the night over at various neighborhood houses untangling their electrical cords!
Then there is us. Pumpkins, mums and fall decorations still on the porch. How dare we.......Thanksgiving is soooo over..........it was 3 whole days ago!!
We begin by throwing away the harvest symbols and getting rid of the "autumn" look.
We then go down to the basement and look at the massive heap of Christmas decorations that stands before us. What tub do we open first? Where do we begin? We just dig in. We begin hauling "the outside" things upstairs. You can always tell who put away what last year. Mine are fully assembled, decorations and all with a bag thrown over the top, bag around the base and the two tied together. Electrical cord missing or tangled in a heap inside the bag. Dave's is completely disassembled, put back in its original wrapping, actually fits in the box it came in (I didn't think that was possible) and the electrical cord is, of course, neatly wrapped, tied and packed properly.
We begin assembling (items Dave packed last year) and fixing (items Marnie packed last year) and getting everything lined up so we can take an inventory and make a plan. Since we are in a new house (and have been the last two Christmases) there is no plan or layout. We have to start from scratch. O.K., red trees should be able to go next to the house with snowmen, little Christmas tree on the porch, big Christmas tree in corner of porch, candy cane tree ("do we have to put that out, it's such a pain in the _____", "of course we have to put that out, how are the kids getting off the bus going to get their candy canes if we don't have the candy cane tree?", (guess which comment Dave made, and which Marnie made :)
Where are we going to put the Christmas countdown, how much garland are we going to need, where is the angel going to go that she won't blow over and break her horn again.....did you get duct tape for her horn?, where is the star going to go and are you going to climb up on the icy roof and put lights on the third floor..........you know they would look really good on the third floor! Candlesticks will look good in front of the porch, lighted wreath can hang behind the porch swing. Should I move the table off the porch and up to the attic or should I throw a red tablecloth and lace overlay on it and call it good.
We (Dave) dragged the red trees out into the 20 mile an hour frigid wind. Two came back inside the garage because we didn't have enough sand and kitty litter to weigh them down and they kept blowing around. The countdown clock got put up but you can't see what we are counting down yet because the lights aren't on the house to shine on it. Right now it looks like the front of a bomb and at this point for all people know we could be counting down when we are going to blow up the house. I put the little tree on the porch, candlesticks went in front of the porch, lighted wreath behind the porch swing.
I laid in bed thinking about the decorations. Decided to go see everything again before their timers go off at midnight. I went out into the cold wind at 11:30 last night to see how everything looked. I came back in the house disgruntled and went back up to bed and exclaimed to Dave, "I pulled the plug". "On what", he said half sleeping. "Christmas". "What?". "I went outside and my little tree had blown over, broke in half and the wreath had swung from its nail on the porch. The red tree is all crumpled over in the wind and the ribbon I had wrapped around my little tree is gone. I couldn't deal with it, so I pulled the plug, pulled your timers and cords out of the outlets. It's over, I pulled the plug".
This morning I got up in the freezing cold hauled the little broken in half tree back into the house to put it back together. Hung the wreath back up on the porch. Tried to fix the crumpled red tree, pushed the kitty litter back into the snowmen and wandered around in the snowy street, bushes and yard to find my ribbon, which I found wrapped among the wood in the woodpile, and brought it back in to to tie to the little tree.
Tonight I will plug everything back in. Christmas is back on.
