The Clean Up

The holidays are done and reality has returned, along with those pounds you lost during the entire year and now have to lose all over again. Don’t cringe. We all do it. It’s the holidays, when all the things you have gone without all year, come seeping out of every corner of everyone’s kitchens.

So, what kind of holiday person are you? The one that waits as long as possible to pack it ll up for another year. The tree, lights, decorations are your happy place and you want them up as long as possible. I had a friend growing up, whose family would keep the tree up, clear into June of July. I find that extreme.

Are you the kind of person who waits until after the first, usually the second, or in the case of this year, any time this weekend. You are probably packing bulbs away as I write, winding up lights. Your husband is outside in the cold taking those lights off the house before going back to work Monday.

Maybe you are the kind of person that has had the house decorated for Christmas, since the day after Thanksgiving, or even before, and are done with it, the day right after Christmas. You have looked at them enough and you want your spaces back.

I’ll confess to you all now. I am the last one I’ve mentioned. I get it all out and up the say after Thanksgiving and Christmas night, I am already itching to have my home back to crisp, clean and uncluttered.

I’m not bah humbug, I’ll say that right now. I am a Christmas baby, born on the 23rd and I love the whole holiday season. But a month of crowded space and tree sheddings, (yes even fake trees shed needles, albeit plastic ones), and the twinkling of colored lights, or white if you’re that boring kind of prim, and I am done, done. I want it all gone back into hiding.

It’s a lot of work putting all that stuff up every year. I appreciate the families that just pack up and go to the mountains to ski, leaving the holidays to the lodges. I want to be that person. But I’m not.

This year I deviated from my rigidity and left it all up until this very morning. I didn’t touch a thing. This Christmas, my son came home for the holidays and I wanted everything to be just as he had lived it all his years with us. A winter wonderland. He’s been away for a year, living and working in a different state and I was homesick to make it special for him. Oh and I did.

He grew up, seeing trees in every room, lit and decorated with trinkets we collected throughout our lives. Trip, ornament exchange, or just ornaments we saw in odd places and had to have. Every tree had a theme and even a name. Big Bertha for the formal living room, Country Lodge for the dining room, Tropics for the white and aqua family room, Cave Dweller, my son’s black tree for his room, etc.. The bathrooms had and have trees too. You get the picture.

I always thought the holidays were a magical time. Most people’s excitement and happiness filled the air. The crispness of the weather making it cozy, fireplaces lit, maybe some snow. All these things together mean family and warmth to me. And so, I wanted that to penetrate every fiber of our bodies this year.

My son walked in after an eight hour drive, looked around and shook his head. His words, “Oh my, mother. I see you’ve been busy.” I giggled and told him I wanted it to feel like home and like every year when he lived home. Did I mention the Christmas Village and train? Ya, I’m a little elf like.

The village is built on a huge four foot by ten foot table and every year it gets a new moving piece. It takes a while to get it up and to my standard. I don’t put it up every year anymore, but this year I had to have it.

This all being said, I was ready to tear it all down and put it all back into its cave in the utility room, but I refrained. Yes! Self control. I have some. Not really, but I forced myself. My son was not leaving until the second of January and you guessed it, I waited. Today, almost all of it was stowed away. The only thing left it the behemoth village, which I say I’ll take my time dismantling, but more than likely, I blaze through that thing to be completely finished with the ho ho ho, as soon as I wrap the first building. I’d not one to tinker. I start and I finish. The end.

So what’s the moral of the lesson, or the point of my rantings today? Well, the epiphany began when I was decorating the house to begin with, and ended this morning. I wanted to have special for my son, for my family, for me, after all, this is a special time of year. This are the traditions we made in and for our small family. And traditions are important.

Traditions are what basically holds society together. The entire world has them. Traditions and customs are handed down, generation to generation. Each generation adding a little something or changing it a bit, to make it their own, maintaining the core of the beginnings of their family’s history. It gives us comfort, makes home, home. It reaches into our soul and bonds our parents, to us, us to our children.

I always want my son to remember the holidays with us. I want that, “when I was growing up…” story that he will share with his kids one day. I had it with my folks.

Every year, we’d go into Manhattan and walk the streets where all the major stores are, like fifth avenue, and look at the holiday decorated storefronts. Every window had these small vignettes of Christmas scenes. They were all animated and moving and it was the thing of dreams. Rockefeller Center has the biggest lit tree and ice skating, a corridor leading to it centered with white angels, playing trumpets, heralding in the season.

I don’t even know if any of the stores still do that, though I was elated to see that the angels, tree and skating still are being upheld as tradition in the Big Apple.

That was not my son’s experience, but we made our own memories. In the end, memories are what we hold, that we don’t discard or change. They can’t be broken like a unique ornament or a lit holiday artifact that no longer works. Memories are what we make that are forever a part of the next generation that follows you, no matter what. They are what keeps us warm on cold or dark days and nights. What men and women hold on to, when they go off to war, hoping and waiting to come home. Nothing else, does this. Certainly not things.

It’s not about how many trees, we bombard are homes with, or if our house lights up brighter than the neighbors. It’s not about what we got or didn’t get. I can barely remember what I got this year as gifts, and certainly have no clue what I received last year. I do remember the people and the things we did and laughed about. I remember the meals and chats around the table or in front of the football games on tv. I remember the love. And that’s what matters and why I held off clearing out the decorations.

I was holding on to the last morsel of a memory of us being together as a family this year. I hope and pray I’ll get that again next year and the next after that, one day, including some grandchildren and daughter in law, in the family memories. Traditions, memories and holidays for me, are about love. And I want to love well. So, I waited and let my son’s memory of home, be a magical one.