Packing Away Christmas

Now that Santa has come, the gifts have been opened and and the celebration has ended, it's that time of the holiday season that most of us don't look forward to.....packing away Christmas for another year. It's just more fun putting up the decorations than taking them down. Maybe it's because as you bring out the decorations, you toss aside the boxes and tell yourself that you'll worry about it a month from now but for now, let's have fun!!  Well, the time has come....it always does and I hate it.

This year I have taken a different approach to collecting all the decorations and packing them away. Only because last year, I missed one rather large decoration on the top of one of our Amish cabinets and when I spotted it two weeks after packing everything away, I said 'forget it' and hoped that nobody would notice it. Well, I did everytime I walked through the room and I promised myself that we would not be subjected to another year of looking at one wayward Christmas decoration for another year.

With the way my memory is and the fact that I can be looking right at a Christmas decoration and actually not really see it as a Christmas decoration, I have devised a new method of getting Christmas put away and we shall see if it works better than in the past years. I call it the "Gather, Then Wait and See' method. When it came time to start gathering up the decoratios, I picked a spot in the house where I used as a 'staging area'. In other words, as I walked around the house and spotted a decoration, I grabbed it and added it to the pile. It's hard to believe but this can take up to a week to accomplish; I mean you can walk into a room, not see a thing and the next time through spot one or even two small decorations still sitting there. Then there's the Christmas coffee cups, spoon holder, towels (oh yeah, I forgot those....must get them out of the towel drawer and onto the pile); stuff that is really out-of-site that is easy to forget.

Well, today is the day to drag out the boxes. Hopefully, my extended gathering idea worked and I won't walk into a room a week from now and see a forgotten item, say 'the heck with it' and have to live with it until Christmas comes around again because I also believe that once those boxes are packed, closed and put up in the garage, they will stay right there until next year.

Hopefully, this will be a better year for getting everything packed away. Plan B is if something is left behind, it will be turned into the holiday decoration of the season. So, I may have a Santa hanging around at Easter wearing rabbit ears or dressed like a pumpkin at Halloween.

We can only hope!!