Christmas Is Over

As with everything this year, it seems like we are running late with getting the Christmas decorations down.  Actually, I was happy with it since I feel like Christmas things should stay up until the Epiphany, but in the past it was just more convenient to take it down New Year’s Day.  But this year due to schedules and other things that were going on (like the plumbing fiasco) we made it all the way to the end of the Christmas season.

I had taken some things down a couple of days earlier (like the girls’ assortment of nutcrackers), but the bulk of the decorations came down today.  Kris emptied all of her snowman decorations and I spent the day taking ornaments off the tree and boxing them back up, taking the tree down, and since it was relatively warm, I got the lights off the bushes outside. 

In fact, the lights needed to come down for a week, because for some reason they hadn’t been working since about the 27^th or 28^th.  I assumed that there was a short in one of the wires, or the stake receptacles.  However, as I was taking the lights off the bushes, I was double checking by plugging them into the outlet in the garage, and they all worked.  I even plugged the stake receptacles in, and plugged the lights into them individually, but they all worked.  After exhausting all my options, I tried my digital stake timer.  The display worked, the manual on/off button worked, and the timer even worked.  However, when the timer was plugged in and I plugged the strings of lights directly into the outlets instead of the extension cords, they wouldn’t work.  So obviously something was jacked up with the timer.  I do have a couple of others, but this one was probably about 8-10 years old, so maybe it was just time to replace it anyway? 

The ornaments took forever.  It is always my least favorite part of the Christmas season.  I began the ornament removal process at around 9:00 AM, and I finished with everything at about 7:30.  This included removing ornaments and reboxing/rewrapping them all, and separating them into bins by ownership (Sarah’s, Ali’s, Family/Kris & Mine).  I also had to figure out how to box up all the new decorations we got his year, which required a trip to Home Depot for a few new bins.  And then labelling and restacking everything in an orderly manner.  The tree and lights also had to be disassembled and stored.  The lights were OK, but the bag that the tree is in is cumbersome and I don’t have a very good place to store it.  I think that eventually I will need to get down in the basement and completely clean house.  Hopefully that happens before next Christmas.