Christmas is Packed Away

I had the best weekend filled with rest and relaxation.  How about you?

The living tree is planted outside although I can't help but feel guilty everytime I see it.  It looks so sad and lonely out in the cold.  Am I transferring?

I undecorated the pruned tree today.  It took me about three days to decorate and about 15 minutes to take apart.

I don't know why it took me so many years to figure out I should just take all of the ornaments off and place them in a basket rather than wandering around the living room with ornament boxes laid out on every surface looking for the box each ornament came from.

And then I set up all the boxes on the dining room table to make quicker work of putting everything back in its place.

All the lights are neatly wound up and packed away ready for next year.

But the day wasn't without incident.

Broken item of the season.

And I was unpleasantly surprised to find a big patch of mold growing under the tree!  I'm not sure what happened.  Perhaps the tree stand leaked?  I've scrubbed it up and there's a little stain but I swear I can smell it.  I think it has to go.  Thank god I'm too poor to have nice Persian carpets.  I'd be more ill.

Everything is packed up and put away in the basement except the outside lights which I usually leave up until somewhere between the Epiphany and the date that a former neighbor left me a note in my mailbox that the lights should come down.

Hey, while I think of it, did you know you can keep paperwhites from getting too leggy by giving them a shot of gin?

Yup.

Read about it at Yankee Magazine.

Although we've been really lucky with warmer than average temperatures and no snow since October, there's cold weather coming.  So we're all snuggling up and hunkering down for what we hope is a very short winter.

Still working on my damn goals for 2012.

How 'bout you?