My tree ate me

The holidays in our house are always borderline homocidal. Half of the attic and a good portion of the basement are home to anything/everything Christmas my mother has collected over the years.

It literally takes the entire month of December to prepare for the guests we have over for Christmas and New Years. Likewise it takes almost as long (if not longer) to get everything back away again. We consider it a feat if the house is de-Christmas-ed by Super Bowl Sunday! (The image below is one room of the madness when comepletely decked out in holiday cheer...don't worry, we've replaced that ugly old pink table cloth with a nice white one.)

Last week the Beaner and I moved her keyboard out of the way and dragged the tree table out of the basement. This accordion table has one purpose, and that is to sit in the basement for 11 months out of the year and then hold the Christmas tree for that last month. It's old, heavy, ugly and hard to maneuver but we managed to free it from the confines of the root cellar and clean it off within a few minutes. Then we set up the tree. Which required a lot of painful fluffing.

Because of allergies and my father's fear of house-fires we have a fake tree. In fact all my life we've never had a real tree. I wonder if a real tree would have been as angry. Literally, the tree ATE my hands this year. I have horrible cuts and scrapes all up and down my hands/wrists. It is painful and unsightly...all in the name of Christmas I guess.

I wanted to do all of this the weekend of Thanksgiving, in fact we were sitting around doing nothing that weekend and it could have been up and out of the way and we'd be on to the third wave of Christmas decoarting by now instead of just nearing the end of the first, but alas...it was too early for my mother to think about Christmas so we waited.

After the tree was up and I was bleeding, it took me until this weekend to go any further (I needed time to lick my wounds). But I feel very accomplished with what I have gotten done. The lights are on the tree, the garland/lights/my painting are up on the mantle, the lights are on the outside of the house, the wreath is on the front porch, and the front door is lit up!

I'm hoping that throughout the week I can get the garlands over the windows and the doors up, the nativity set/advent wreath/menorah set on the mantle (yes, amongst all the cacophony of Christmas this is one lonely small rubbermaid with a few dredels and a menorah in it for my Dad), and get all of those boxes back into the basement so next weekend I can commense in wave two.

Wave two is when I bring down all of the boxes of various ornaments and other decorative paraphenilia. If there is a bow undressed, the tree is NAKED! So we have to shove ornaments on every available limb unless we want to suffer the wrath of my mother!

There are also: massive amounts of linen that need to be found/cleaned/ironed before use, bathrooms to scrub, and after wave three there will be a massive tidying and post-decorating clean-up.

However wave three is always the craziest. You see, my mother has Spode Tree china. We pull it out every year for Christmas, use it for Christmas dinner and then stare at it for the rest of December.

Up until two years ago Spode was off limits to be touched by ANYONE but my mother. We were supposed to carefully bring down the rubbermaids full of placesettings and glassware and leave it in the dining room for my mother to unpackage. Then she would wrap up her year-round china and we were bring those boxes carefully back up into the attic while she cleaned and displayed the Spode.

I'm finally at the age where my mother trusts me to do this all myself. Perhaps it is because I finally have china of my own...you know, the type that sits in its boxes in the basement waiting for the day I have a home of my own to display/use it in. But either way come hell or high water, the Spode will be down from the attic by next week and we'll be finished decorating/cleaning before Christmas Eve.

Really, we're that ridiculous. It's not just me, it's my entire family.