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.

Christmas is finally over

Christmas is finally over at our house. It took all of Saturday and a piece of Sunday to get the deed done. We were late this year, the end arriving five days after the calendar's end of Christmas, Jan. 6 (Epiphany). But other commitments interfered — the birth of a grandson and the five-day trip to help out with the newborn,  and the simple magnitude of the task.

Our  Christmas decorations have expanded over the years. Like our library of Christmas music — once just a couple of LPs offered cheap by retailers, now a cupboard full of cassette tapes, CDs and digital music — our Christmas decorations have multiplied exponentially. Year after year, we've added an item or two to our collection until now every room in the house and several spots outdoors get the Christmas trimmings. We've gone from one tree to two because my wife had collected so many angel ornaments that she had to have a second tree to display them all. Christmas-themed placemats, hand towels and even photographs now are pulled from boxes in the attic and displayed. Furniture has to be moved to make room for the trees. Statuettes, wall hangings and knick-knacks find their places in every room.

But now it's done for another 11 months. The live tree, still green and glossy, lies by the curb to be turned to compost or whatever the city does with thousands of trees each year. The boxes are back in the attic to be forgotten for another 11 months. Last night, I poured a mug of the last of the Christmas wassail and gulped the spicy, hot fruit juice one last time.

Christmas is truly over now. When does spring come?

Christmas decorations go up, await bigger event

The cold has driven me inside. I didn't even take the dog for a walk Friday it was so chilly (and I was beaten down by a head cold), and she was not happy about it.

But on this bright, cheery Saturday, the dome of the blue sky looks appealing, and the outdoors beckons, despite temperatures in the 30s, if that. It's a brisk day, not a biting cold, windy day, so my Southern blood can stand it, perhaps even do some outside work. With the trees shed of their leaves, outdoor chores are fewer now. The lawn and the driveway are nearly bare of leaves, and I can live with the few wayward leaves that speckle the ground.

Today, we are continuing the transformation of our home into a temple to Christmas, both religious and secular. I'll have to install the Christmas flags and the Santa wind sock. I've placed candles in the appropriate windows. The other decorations, ranging from photographs of Christmases Past to whimsical Santas and elves, will find their proper places. The tree — the primary tree with fresh green needles, sticky sap and the aroma of Christmas — will have to wait until the other decorations are in place. Then it will be another all-day job, or nearly so, to decorate that tree with all the ornaments collected over nearly 40 years.

It's a shame to go to all this work for only two people. For decades, we've opened our home to friends, neighbors and colleagues in an open house that was, inevitably, a whirlwind of greetings, conviviality, food and drink, and good cheer — an event that made all the decorating worthwhile. This year, alas, that festive evening is being overtaken by a more significant event. The imminent arrival of grandson number five has put our schedule on hold and has prevented our planning any events of our own or accepting any invitations, except tentatively. Fewer people will be exposed to the garlands, candles, foods, wassail and good cheer at our home this year, but we could not, like the Kranks of John Grisham's  novel, "skip" Christmas this year. Or any year.

But in this Christmas season, it seems entirely appropriate that a newborn baby should take priority over whatever else clutters our lives.