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Christmas decorations don’t come down until after New Year’s Day around here. I had taken down the outdoor lights and cleared off two mantles last week which left one mantle and the tree. Today then was the last official day of Christmas around here. Left it up a little longer than normal because this one was really pretty and it had held up remarkably well.
The vibe is totally different when things go up. Got Christmas music playing and looking at the ornaments again is like seeing old friends. Everyone tells some kind of story. Some were gifts from family and friends. Some were mementos of placed we’ve visited. A few that have seen better days adorned the various trees we had growing up. And some were just randomly obtained at various points in our life together.
Now it is like putting them away to hibernate until next Christmas which will come sooner than I think as time passes so quickly as you get older. Because we live in a wooded area, I can just prop the tree up until it gets removed during spring clean up. No neighbors to see it and complain. I do have a series of red dots on my arm from moving it out of the house (I’m allergic to so many things) so it is like the tree marked me on its way out.
Fortunately, today is sunny and slightly above freezing so it was easy to sweep away the path of needles that fell as the tree was dragged around the side of the house. Also good that we have no snow on the ground. So I guess it was a good day to get it done.
And now we have to grind through January with no lights. We are slowly gaining daylight – having picked up roughly 11 minutes since the shortest day of the year. But we still have a long way to go before we can really start thinking about spring.
Facing Diagonal Wall 