Winding Down

Christmas is over.

Christmas is over.

My God, how sad is that? It feels like I just put up our tree and just finished making (yes, I said making) ornaments to hang on it. Sigh. Where did it all go?

Chandra and I had an e-mail conversation the other day while at work, about how depressed we both were to take down Christmas. She and Kevin picked out a gorgeous real tree that they decorated in silver and red and one green ball for Bax, and going to their house and not seeing that big beautiful tree when I walk in the front door will break my heart a little. So you can imagine how much it sucked to take down mine.

I feel like I really got into Christmas this year. The decorating, anyway. We won’t get into my shopping angst. I swear I will try to be better about that next year, but next year is very very far away. But the decorating…well, just ask SK.

This is the first year I have had a place TO decorate at Christmas, though. True, we decorated the dorms and apartments that I lived in with roommates during college, but we were never THERE at Christmas and never did it big. Never have I had my own tree. Never have I had my own box of ornaments to decorate my own tree with. And never have I had my own box of Christmas decorations with which to decorate my home.

Our tree went up the weekend after Thanksgiving and, in my family, it is supposed to come down before the New Year starts. If your tree stays up into the new year, it is believed that you are bringing the baggage from the old year into the new one and that is pretty much just as bad as spitting on your g-ma at the dinner table. My family is very traditiony and superstitious like that.

SK and I debated on whether to buy a real tree or a fake one and ultimately went with fake. Nothing to water, minimal needle clean-up and the promise of a healthy looking green tree on December 31^st. I had tree scented wall plug-ins from Bath and Body Works to substitute for the just-cut smell, and lots of other yummy smelling candles to make the apartment cozy. The day we put up the tree and started decorating, SK even built a fire. I am living with a MAN.

Decorating our apartment with decorations from my mom and his mom made me so happy. I thought I just might quit my job and do it full time. You know, the decorating. Our apartment would be very festive year-round. It’s a really good thing that we don’t have much horizontal space—just a dining room table, top of the tv and mantle—otherwise I would have gone really nuts. Most of the decorations that we had fit in the space we have, and the rest just had to stay in the boxes to hopefully see the glory that will be OUR HOUSE! at Christmastime next year.

I loved getting home in the evenings and walking into the dark apartment lit up just by the colored lights on the Christmas tree. Pulling into the complex, our apartment is one of the first that you see, and seeing the balcony glowing and the tree through the window just gave me such a sense of HOME. The same feeling I get when I walk into my mom’s house at Christmas, and I never expected to feel that way about an apartment we’d leased for a year.

The decorations are down now and the apartment is far less glowy and cozy feeling. There is still an imprint of the tree stand in the carpet. SK has pointed out how empty the living room looks. Bella is happy that she can once again lay completely stretched out in the sun that shines through the window, but I have even noticed her sniffing around the tree stand outline. Christmas, we miss you.

I’m already planning next year’s décor. December can’t come soon enough.