Decorations come down with sadness

The Christmas decorations are coming down, and it's a two-day job, maybe more. The dining room, the stair landing and other spots throughout the house are piled with Christmas decorations that have inspired, uplifted and comforted us for a month. Now it is time for them to go back into the cabinets and the attic whence they came.

These decorations are the accumulation of a lifetime, a collection with no central theme other than Christmas itself. It is an eclectic mix of Santas and angels and books and pictures of Christmases past. There are also bells and wreaths and lights and candles, all revolving around the Christmas theme, bringing light to our winter darkness, warmth to our winter chill.

My wife, who spends days sorting through the collection each December and carefully placing each artifact for best effect, has spent this weekend defrocking the Christmas spirit that has occupied this house since the beginning of Advent. She hates this job as much as she loves last month's task of placing tidings of comfort and joy. But Epiphany is past, and it is time to strike the set of our Christmas comedy. The live greenery went first. The tree found its way to the curb, and the sprigs of holly, nandina and fir went into the compost bin. All that is not compostable or disposable is being packed away.

Now, on a day that dawned with a temperature of 20 degrees and has barely exceeded freezing all day, we must put behind us the light and anticipation of Christmas and face the bleak midwinter, all gray and lifeless. January, chosen by the ancients to be the beginning of the new year, hardly looks like anything new. The first signs of new life are a month or two or three away when brave crocuses and daffodils will dare to splash colors across the gray landscape, and we will have hope again that azaleas and dogwoods and tulips will follow. Until then, we gird our bodies and our minds against the cold and dark, remembering while we still can the glorious warmth of spring in all its colorful beauty. This memory is all we have to get us through to spring.