It’s the Least Wonderful Time of the Year

The Christmas season: a wonderful time of the year when you and your friends and relatives get together around a Christmas tree to enjoy each others company and exchange presents. It's a magical time of year when twinkle lights dot houses across your neighborhood. And now it's January and you don't feel like taking any of that stuff down.

My wife and I decorated our house fairly early this year -- we had the Christmas tree up by the first weekend in December. And because we had everything up so early, we've been adding Christmas stuff to our Christmas stuff and now, when we step back and look at everything, we have a really, really large amount of stuff to put away that neither of us feel like putting away. The joy and happiness of getting ready for Christmas a month ago has been replaced with having to drag boxes and bags down to put everything away.

And why hasn't anyone invented an easy way to store a Christmas tree? They make artificial trees that all of the branches come off -- and you can never get them all to fit back in the box. They make trees that come apart in sections -- and you can never get them all to fit back in the box. They make pre-lit Christmas trees, which really hasn't made taking the tree down any easier. Every year, I seriously consider just throwing a big bag over our tree and shoving it into a closet... that's probably no less or more efficient than taking the thing apart properly.  And if ornaments break, we'll buy new ones (we seem to buy new ones every year anyway).

Maybe we need post-Christmas music to set the mood and to help us with the un-Christmasing of stuff. Imagine such mid-winter classics as, "The Twelve Days of Nothing To Look Forward To," "I'll Be Home For Late-January," "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Deer Standing On The Side of the Expressway," and "Have a Holly Jolly National Bath Safety Month" (January is National Bath Safety Month).

Happy post-holidays, everyone. We'll do it all again in eleven months. If you wait long enough, you might as well just keep the tree up.