Undecorating Day

Russian Christmas has passed, and the weather outside isn't too horrible, so now there really isn't any plausible excuse for leaving up the Christmas decorations outside. (The indoor ones may stay up for a few more weeks; usually they're all down by the end of January.)

It took a lot less time than I expected to pull the cheap glass ornaments off the two evergreens that flank my front steps (hint for using glass ornaments outdoors: they need to be drained of all the water that has filled them over the past few weeks), disconnect all of the strands of lights and put each one in its own personal plastic grocery bag (with groups of lights having their plastic bags grouped together into larger plastic bags), remove the small spike-based pre-lit Christmas trees from their flower pots, pull up the outdoor power taps (a great convenience and one of those items, like miniature CD-Rs and CD clock radios, that I was able to locate by logically deducing that it should exist), and drag in the outdoor extension cords. And like that, poof, all external signs of Christmas are gone. Mostly, anyway.

And once again I make the resolution to put away all this stuff in a neat, orderly, and well-labeled manner. Of course, part of the fun and creativity of Christmas decorating is coming up with a different scheme each year - partially because you're trying to do something new each year, but mostly because you did such a slapdash put-away job eleven months previously that you simply can't figure out where the hell everything is!