Every year it seems like there's that
one Christmas decoration that gets overlooked when all the others are
put away at the end of the season. You know the one. The little
figurine or picture or table runner or towel that gets overlooked
in all the re-boxing and storing and cussing, and then – WaBam! –
it's July and someone asks “Why do you still have this life-size
Santa standing in the corner of your living room, half-buried under a
pile of unfolded laundry?”
You know the one.
Eventually you find it and set it at
the top of the stairs with all the other stuff you plan on taking
downstairs on your next trip to the laundry room, and then – WaBam!
– it's November and you're going to be getting the Christmas
decorations out soon anyway, so, why bother?
Or maybe you do take it
downstairs, but all the Christmas decoration boxes are full, and
you've piled a bunch of stuff on the floor in front of them so you
can't get to them to store it away properly (and you'd like to say
the storage area is a mess because of The Great Remodel, but the
truth is it's always higgledy-piggledy) and so you end up putting it
in with a pile of random holiday decorations and it's never seen
again or at least not for a couple of years and by then everyone's
forgotten about it and – WaBam! – it's like having a brand new
decoration to display.
My point is...
This year's front-runner for mis-stored
Christmas decoration is Max's stocking. He thinks it's still in the
living room, under the Christmas tree, hidden among the empty boxes
and the last few (practical) gifts (like the socks that I lovingly
picked out because they desperately needed them and the jigsaw
puzzles I gave them even though I am the one who ends up putting
them together although they all appear out of no where to put that last piece in). Gifts that I will add to the assorted piles in their
rooms when I take down the Christmas tree.
Taking down the Christmas tree, of
course, reveals that one Christmas ornament that gets
overlooked when all the other ornaments are carefully taken off the
tree for re-boxing and storing, so when it comes time to take apart
and store the Christmas tree – WaBam! – there it is and you have
to set it aside while you continue to unfluff and unplug and fold up
and squish the pokey, dusty, fake-needle dropping tree sections back
into the box because they all came out of there and so they must all
go back in but now they don't fit and you're hot and sweaty and dusty
and where did that freaking decoration go and where is the cat and
why is the box meowing?
Except!
Except that this year the children were
in charge of putting the decorations on the tree and they took one
look at the piles of stuff on the floor in front of the Christmas tree decoration boxes and decided that we would do a
minimalist tree, enjoying the sparse beauty of a semi-fluffed,
pre-lit artificial tree upon which most of (well, some of) the lights
worked.
In the quiet darkness, those twinkling
white lights (the ones that lit, anyway) were quite lovely and
peaceful. Or they were until the cat decided to claim the tree as his
own fortress of solitude and hid beneath it to launch nightly
surprise attacks upon the unsuspecting ankles of anyone passing by.
Eventually The Princess decided to add
some hand-crafted decorations to the tree, just like she did
I am hoping that Max's stocking turns
up eventually, but if not it will join the Santa decoration
which has sat on top of the entertainment center year-round for the
past three years. Santa's become a fixture up there, along side the
family photos in the inspirational, catch-phrase photo frames (“Good
Times,” “The Boys,” “Family Fun”). The photos that are now five years out of date – except for the “Family Fun” frame which still has
two empty spots – in the frames that caused The Princess to roll
her eyes so hard they still haven't focused.
“Mooooom,” she said, rolling her
eyes, “we're not that kind of people.”
What kind
of people? I asked.
“The kind of people who put signs
with words on them everywhere.” Which is kind of funny, because
since then she has painted approximately ninehundredseventythree
canvases with inspirational sayings and snippets of songs and they
cover Every. Square. Inch. of previously bare wall space in her room.
And she's right, because I'm fairly
certain the kind of people who routinely display inspirational
messages on their walls would never leave a Santa decoration up all
year. For multiple years.
Sometimes I worry that I'm
shortchanging my kids by not decorating for each season. But at least
once a month I do try to rotate the pile of mail, newspapers and
assorted school papers needing to be signed and returned – or at
least clear off enough space on the dining room table for three
plates (we're never all four home for dinner at the same time
anyway). And the laundry is always folded and moved out of the living
room within two weeks. And there isn't (hardly) any expired food
(from 2009) in the refrigerator.
And in addition to the year-round Santa
decoration, I also have a pink-glittered Valentine heart on my
bookshelf, a red-white-and-blue flower arrangement over my sewing
table and a solar-powered, head-bobbing, Thanksgiving turkey figure
on my desk, so it's not that I don't decorate for the
holidays, but more like I decorate for all of them all the time.
I'm multi-decorational. Continual
celebrational.
Happy Chris-Val-Fourth-Giving.
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