Jingle Bells

When I was a young child, my family would buy a Christmas tree a couple of days before Christmas and leave it out on the back porch. I lived in fear that someone would steal the tree before Christmas, but no one ever did. On Christmas morning, my brother and I would wake up to see what toys Santa Claus had brought us and to see the tree that Santa decorated while we were asleep. My grandmother (we lived in her house) insisted that the Christmas tree and all the decorations come down on New Year’s Day, and we had to eat black eyed peas (yuck). When I was in college and mostly running the affairs of my household (my grandmother had passed away and my mother had bought the house), I would see that we bought and decorated the Christmas tree a whole week before Christmas and not take it or the decorations down until at least a weekend after New Year’s Day. Admittedly, the evergreen would start to look like an everbrown by that time and it was sometimes difficult to get rid of the thing since the city pick up was usually earlier than our timetable allowed. After I got married (a long time ago), my husband and I bought an artificial Christmas tree which we would put up around the first weekend of December and take down many weeks after New Year’s Day. While not a personal best, this year our now two artificial trees went up on November 29 and we just took them down this weekend on March 28. You can pretty much guess that we enjoy having the decorations up, but even we have a hard time celebrating Easter with Christmas decorations festooning the house.