Taking down Christmas always makes me a little mulenkully (melancholy for those of you who haven’t seen ‘Megamind’). The house looks so bare and uneventful. Things are a little ‘too’ clean – if that’s possible. It’s like pulling out the summer plants before the frost, or giving away that beloved skirt that you swore you’d fit back into one day. At least with Christmas decorations, I know I only have to wait about 320 days before I can get them out again.
And it’s so much bigger of a job than putting the things up seems to be. This year, we made a great team. With Sarah’s help, Dave worked on the outside of the house (did I tell you he won our town’s Best Lights award? That’s another blog.), and Brian and I did the inside. Brian also climbed on the highest parts of the roof to remove lights, since we were all sorely afraid. ;) In the house, he took down all of the high stuff, we worked together to pack up my Santa collection, and I disassembled the tree. That was a reflective time for me.
When we started to put up our Christmas decorations this year, I threw out the idea of a theme tree. We all decided to stick with the 'same old' ornaments that we've collected through the years and, haphazard as it was, the tree turned out beautifully.
I loved the little monkey that hangs upside down, the hand-painted animal shaped pillows that I colored with markers when I was little (apparently I was particularly fond of brown at the age of five), the slightly more skillfully painted ceramic ones completed by my brothers and sister and I at our neighbor’s house one Christmas, the glass balls with the little pink roses in them that my Grama Alice gave Dave and I our first Christmas together, the nail, the various engraved baby cradle showcasing Brian’s delivery, clarinets and ballet dancers representing Sarah’s childhood whims, the red foam ball, skillfully cut in half and then adorned with Dave’s 4th grade picture, the personalized cow bells and tiny dancers and seashells and red convertibles holding Santa purchased for us in various parts of the world, the blue wooden house to represent our first, the blinged-out S and B.
It wasn’t until I started taking all of the ornaments back off the tree that I realized we did have a theme tree after all. The theme of Us.