Decking the halls

Our entire long Thanksgiving weekend is prescheduled. All I get done is to help make/eat Thanksgiving dinner and decorate for Christmas. Everything else takes a back seat. Laundry and dishes stack up because I’m too busy taking down and putting up the décor. Who wants to wash when she can decorate?

By tradition, no Christmas decorating can start in our house until Thanksgiving Friday morning. But, after that, our house looks as if we’re getting ready to move.

Dad was surprised at the extent of our seasonal decorating efforts. “You even change the pictures?”

Who wants to look at the same pictures all year? Not us!

We used to have floor furnaces. When they died, we installed a natural gas stove downstairs. Floor furnace grates are now our vents. The vent just visible in lower right corner became our “hatch”. It sits right above our storage rooms where nearly all our decorations are stored. I carry the boxes up a ladder and hand them to Hubby.

Passing boxes through the hatch is much easier on my knees than going up and down our spiral staircase. I’d hurt for days afterwards. And I had several nasty falls.

By the time we erect and decorate two trees and nearly every horizontal surface in our dining and living rooms, I am very ready to collapse into my recliner and enjoy our handiwork.