goodbye Christmas

We took the Christmas decorations down today.  It isn't quite twelfth night, but they went up a few days before Christmas, and it felt as though they had been up for long enough.  I always feel sad stripping the Christmas tree, even though I know I don't really want a cut fir tree in my sitting room for the entire year.  There is a certain ritual pleasure in putting all the decorations back in the right boxes.  The three large fat baubles from Cracow were packed away into the white cardboard box in which they travelled home all the way from Poland, sitting on my lap during the flight, in the days before airlines became so picky about quantities of hand luggage.  The long drop-shaped baubles from Heals, the red ones with their incredibly smooth lustre and the clear glass with snowflake patterns, went into their flat boxes with concertina folds to hold each decoration securely.  The heaviest metal stars went in the bottom of a cardboard box, with the DIY store balls next, and the slightly more delicate and upmarket baubles from John Lewis on top.  The shaker style hearts, the tartan stocking, the giraffe angel, the wooden teddy bear with hinged arms and legs, and the sinister hanging cat with his pipe cleaner thin legs and red scarf and mittens, were tucked carefully into another cardboard box on top of the little boxes of special glass balls.

The Systems Administrator put the two strings of lights into two separate bags.  The new lights have the same desperate urge to twist around themselves as a saucepan of Chinese noodles (hands up who has ever managed to serve a pan of these equally between two bowls, rather than finding they slither in one tangled mass into the first dish).  I had better remember to leave plenty of time to unwind them from themselves next year.  I remembered to put the bag of spare bulbs at the top of one of the boxes, and not under all the baubles, since you need to get the lights tested, working and on the tree before putting anything else on it.

The tree was unscrewed from its supporting stand, and carried out of the front door in a hail of needles.  All Christmas we've been saying to each other how well it was holding its needles.  Not any more.  The SA hasn't even put the vacuum cleaner away yet, on the basis that we are sure to spot more needles every time the sun shines from a new direction for several days.  We'll still be finding a few we missed in October.

The SA took the greenery down from the mantelpiece, and proudly showed me the holly berry.  Just the one.  It was all the birds had left us by Christmas Eve.  I put the big candle back in the spare room, out of the way of the cats and protected from dust and sunlight for another year by an old pillow case.  The red cloth and the white lace cloth and the other red cloth that the tree sits on all went in the wash.  The black cat had taken to sleeping under the tree, and the other red cloth was covered in clumps of black fur as well as pine needles.

The Christmas cards are in a pile on my desk, waiting to be checked through for those that need replies, those that include the names of people's children which I must write in the address book before I forget them again, and those with such good pictures I can't bear to throw them away.  Putting the best ones in a shoe box under my desk instead of the paper recycling bin doesn't really achieve anything, and I ought to go through the box and pick out some of the saved cards that would go well together, and put them in a frame.  We have spare clip-together frames about the place, and quite a lot of pictures of cats.

The sitting room looked sad and empty when we'd finished, and we retreated to the study this evening.  It is easier to heat, and feels cosier than the bare expanse where the tree used to be.

I did an hour of work as well, checking through the plant centre's website for pages that need updating now that Christmas, Christmas shopping, Christmas trees, and wishes of goodwill for Christmas and the New Year are redundant.  I was amused to discover that the list of creatures customers might see during their visit included two guinea foul.  The dogs and pea fowl get mentioned by name, but not the staff, except for the manager.