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January 05, 2006
That’s that all over for another year...
Well all the decorations are down and carefully placed in their respective bags and boxes. I was going to do it yesterday but Littleone wept so bitterly asking why Christmas can’t last all year long, so I left them up for another day, hoping that she’ll be in the back-at-school routine today and she’ll come home and won’t even notice they’re gone. Well I can hope.
I’m relaxing with a cuppa herbal right now and surveying the room wondering which lonesome item will be discovered down the back of the sofa, or under the bed seconds after it’s all been stashed away in the lock-up for another year. I’ll keep you posted.
For me taking down the Christmas Decorations is more of an event than putting them up, it’s a kind of emotional roller coaster, neither more pleasurable, nor pitiful, simply more reflective, I guess.
I think it’s because I dislike drawn out goodbyes and having the decorations hanging around till Twelfth night seems like just that, morbid, and garish like having a coffin hanging around in the front room until the funeral. If it was down to me I’d have it all done on January 1st so that we are ready to move on and face the New Year, clutter and baggage free.
What springs to mind first of all, is an already fading memory of that time, not so long ago (it just feels like a lifetime) when we were fired with anticipation, pulling out these very decorations from these very boxes and placing a string of tinsel here, a snowman there, the wreath on the door; and I remember that this was the first year where Littleone got really excited, asking such questions as ‘How will Santa get in if we haven’t got a chimney?’ and I wonder how many more years will be like this before she walks through that door and grunts ‘Santa? No-one believes in him anymore.’
Which then sets me off thinking about the future, where will we be in 11 months time when we brush off the dust and yank these decorations out again? Will things be so different, or will it all be the same? Would some major life-changing event have befallen us, or will we be plodding along, same as ever?
So here I am sitting with a soon-to-be filled gap where the Christmas tree once stood. (At least we have a reusable tree, when I was a kid I would become mournful over the death of the tree and now I’ve left home I can’t bring myself to have a real one as a result. I blame Hans Christian Andersen.) The room seems lighter, fresher somehow, ready for another year.
Posted by purple elephant at January 5, 2006 12:02 PM