Sweeping Away the Year

It’s Carter’s last day home so to compound the dreaded feeling I decided I needed to start taking down Christmas. I also wanted to take advantage of Carter being able to help take the boxes out of the attic.

I didn’t start with the tree as that is it’s own nightmare. I started by taking down the needlepoint since it is the first to go up. The needlepoint gets treated better than all other Christmas ornamentation. It has special boxes that go under the guest room bed so they are close at hand in case I ever have to escape the house.

I put all the flat needlepoints in one box and all the three dimensional in another. This year the 3-D’s are in a bigger box, but there is still plenty of room to add more. I figure I can stitch for at least five more years and not have filled my two garlands.

After the needlepoint I carefully dismantled and wrapped the village under glass that takes up the whole coffee table. I had to windex the table before putting back the year-round decorations.

Then I packed the nutcrackers, Santa’s and snowmen. Lastly I dismantled the mantle. Cleaned every surface and put back the non-holiday items. Everything looks so barren even though that is not a word you would use to describe my living room.

It didn’t take that long to do that one room, but one was all I could do today. I figure I have until Sunday to get everything done. At dinner I asked what day it was today and when I learned it was only Wednesday I revised my schedule. I think I can get it all done by Friday.

I won’t have Carter to distract me. Russ has so much work he will be tied up. So I might as well get this all behind me in the next two days.

As if the putting away the sparkle is not bad enough, it’s the cleaning between packing the Christmas and unpacking the regular that I hate. Making sure to remove every rogue glitter that jumped from it’s decorations, or the dust that settled between the mercury balls on the table. With the Christmas ornaments the dust is not noticed. Once they are all gone you are only left with the dust. Not so appealing.

Regular life is going to start up next week. There won’t be time to dust or vacuum and I certainly don’t want to start 2023 out with any dirt. 2022 was a year I would like to sweep away. I am hoping that the new year brings joy, health and happiness and dirt does not go with any of those.