The Holidays are Officially Over

I finally put away all the Christmas decor last Sunday.  Chris was watching some monumental marathon of a miniseries (Shaka Zulu - and did you catch that sweet alliteration??) so I ended up doing it mostly myself.  He did help carry things to the basement when I was done, though, so he gets brownie points for that.


It seemed to go up a lot slower than taking it down.  I guess because when you are putting it up you are examining the ornaments for the tree and reminiscing about times past, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Then when you take it down you don't care so much about the revelry.


This year was especially different because we finally poured through all the ornaments we inherited from Chris' mom.  She had two solid boxes of ornaments that were about 18" x 24" x 12" and each housed at least two levels of ornaments.  I think we had about a quarter of that on our own.  Needless to say it was quite fun looking thru all the memories of Chris' family and having him tell stories about different ones.  There were some from the 1940s!  That Sherri sure knew how to preserve her ornaments, by gosh.  And man did our tree look lovely.  Last year it was a bit sparce, but THIS year we had so many that we didn't even get to put all of the ornaments up!  I'm going to have to institute a rotating stock policy to make sure all get fair play.


But now that everything is put away, I finally have my whole living room to myself again for the first time in almost a year!  Due to the storage room build-out, the room had been the dumping ground for all the stuff that was going into the storage room (and then some).  Once that project was finished (11 months later...) then it was Christmas time and the tree went up in the place where all the stuff was.  Now the tree is down and the room looks so barren, but I'm quite happy with that because of what it took to get to this point.