Goodbye Holiday Season!

The Holiday Season is over; I can tell. This is the first Saturday in weeks that I don't have a party to attend.

And the Christmas decorations are starting to disappear from the house.

The decorations usually start appearing in October. While everybody else is carving pumpkins, my wife is digging out some of the innumerable Christmas chotchkies; the smaller Santas and Frostys, the Christmas themed dishtowels and the 6-inch tree she keeps on the kitchen counter. Then all through November, bit by bit, like watching a slow motion video of a lava flow taking over a small Pacific village, the house turns from a home for people to a Christmas village we have to live in. The coasters disappear, to be replaced with the Christmas set that we can't use (who am I kidding? like I use a coaster at home anyway); then the guest towels and the poinsettia shower curtain appear in the bathroom, and one afternoon on the way home I notice the wreath up on the front door.

Thanksgiving Day the Tree goes up; another sacrifice my wife makes. She loves a live tree, but has an issue. I won't get a live tree until after December 15th. And since none of the boys will help her get a live tree before Thanksgiving, she has to have an artificial one. And the boys will help her drag it out of the attic in November.

Christmas may have been creeping up on me since Halloween, but on Thanksgiving it arrives with full gale force. Every window sill has a Dickens village; the stocking hanger army has arrived on the fireplace, with their stockings in tow; the Shelf Elf is patrolling the living room nightly and I have to move some sort of Christmas paraphernalia just to find a spot to rest my beer.

New Years Day it all ends (personally, I think she has set out the last of the decorations the day before); like a movie fog that slowly recedes leaving the landscape visible once again, the decorations start to find their summer homes. And there are always a few new ones; the after Christmas sales always tend to have a few MUST-HAVE bargains.

But every year a few more things don't summer in the attic. We have lived with the Christmas soap dispenser in the bathroom for a few years now. and we have gotten accustomed to the snowman and reindeer glasses year round. The Santa snow globe has been a summer squatter for a while now, and there are probably others that I just have blinded myself to. I learned years ago that there are decorations that 'don't fit' into the attic, and have to be displayed.

I also learned years ago that my offers to help make things fit only earned me an icy stare. I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid. I quit volunteering to help.

I really don't mind the small things she does to keep Christmas around her year round.

It's much better than putting up with the Tree all year, like she would like to do.