Waving good-bye to Christmas

I love Christmas. I love the decorations (the not gaudy ones), some of the songs (not “My Grown-Up Christmas List” or “The Christmas Shoes”), the special church services, the nativity scenes, and the chance to spend time with family. I get overly excited about decorating my house for Christmas, always after Thanksgiving, though.

But this year, getting the house decorated seemed like a chore. Then getting it undecorated seemed like even more of a displeasure. I wanted the tree and all the trimmings down before the New Year and didn’t want to spend New Year’s Day or my half day of vacation tomorrow doing it. So, I swallowed my pride and laziness this afternoon and came home ready to take that tree down.

Ah, how naive.

For your reading enjoyment, here’s how it all went down:

The tree in happier times, you know, before it overstayed its welcome.

Knowing that my complaining and offers to pay people to undecorate my house had fallen on deaf ears, I tried to pump myself up with my jaunty fedora. I hoped it would help my mood and energize me. It didn’t, but it was worth the try.

Then, realizing that heaving the three sections of my tree back into the bag and figuring out how to stuff that into my storage area off the patio was going to be a feat, I thought a dose of caffeine might do the trick. (Please, stop all talk of interventions. I’m fine!)

Finally, it was time to get to work. This tree was coming DOWN!

That was actually the easy, somewhat enjoyable part. I even got the three parts of the tree safely in the storage bag. Then, I had this great idea to heave the tree up on the highest shelf in the storage area. Yes, in hindsight, I realize the stupidity of this idea. But in the moment, it seemed like a good one. So there I was, perched on this rickety step ladder my dad once left at my house trying to heave this enormous green Christmas tree storage bag full of my stupid tree above my head and onto the shelf. The bag got caught on a random nail. The out-of-control end of the bag hit a little ceramic flower pot flying off a shelf and crashing to the concrete, shattering in a billion pieces. At one point, I manuevered the bag straight into a flower pot that had some water in it, which of course, ended up all over the bag, then all over my pants. Fun times. After much grunting and almost falling off the ladder with the bag wrenched above my head, I realized this wasn’t going to work.

I finally got the tree properly stored (I may have yelled at it a little). In the end, I was covered with dust, the house was undecorated, and I was pretty sure I might have a splinter.

At least the house is back to normal. I think. I’m fairly sure I probably forgot something.