The remnants of Christmas have been cleared away. The last four cheese stars went on the bird table. The cards have been taken down, the greenery put on the bonfire, the festive tablecloths put in the wash, the tree dismantled, and the radiator in the sitting room turned off as we retreat to the study. Does anybody wait until Twelth Night nowadays? The Christmas season seems to begin so long before Christmas these days that by the end of the New Year Bank holiday it ought to be over. The shops have probably got their Easter stuff in by now. Tradition is all very well, but the decorations would have overstayed their welcome by Friday.
Even so, it's sad taking them down. I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names). It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be. Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well. Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened. And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time. So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton. The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside. We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.
I saved the cones in case they came in useful. I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them. If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones. All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them. The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure. The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole. A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).
There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock. That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument. I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew. It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail. I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before. The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books. I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.
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