The Year of the Christmas Tree

Back when I was pregnant, my energy levels fluctuated wildly - within the "low" range.  By the time I was in my third trimester, I was feeling all right, and like I had more energy than I had previously - but not enough to, like, do anything.  Unfortunately, most of my third trimester was spent around the holidays.

I love Christmas time.  The Yeti and I aren't religious at all.  However, I was never raised in a particularly religious household.  We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but we didn't go to church at all and I don't even know how old I was when I realized there was a Biblical component to Easter (it's all bunnies and eggs and springtime, right?), but it was well into elementary school.

Thus, I have no internal conflict in maintaining a totally secular Christmas, and like to milk as much joy and magic from the season as I can.  My plan this past year was to put the tree up a little early, my rationale being that as time went on, I'd only get more pregnant and more tired.  Any time after November 1 was fair game, I decided.

As it turned out, though, I was feeling pretty tired then.  And the next week.  I caught my terrible cold from Hell around then, too, so I was too busy hacking, sneezing and immediately making a mad dash for the bathroom after either activity.  Though I intended to put the tree up as soon as possible, I didn't actually get anything up until the beginning of December.

With this track record, perhaps I should taken the tree down immediately after Christmas.  But I thought it might be fun to leave it up until Thumper was born, to take him home to a nicely lit Christmas tree.  And it might be easier to take it town when I wasn't big and pregnant anyway...

...Perhaps you can see where this is going.

Oh, look!  You can see the lit tree in the background of this pic of Thumper... taken in the middle of February.

And oh, there it is peeking out again! ...in a picture taken sometime after St. Patrick's Day.  

The problem was that whenever I had a spare minute in which to take down the tree, there was always something more valuable I could be doing instead.  At first, that was sleep.  Then it became stuff like laundry or dishes or just sitting a moment.  

To make matters worse, I had our stockings hung from little bookend-type hangers on our bookshelf.  That bookshelf just happened to be in the background when we Skyped with family.  And without fail, someone always noticed it and commented on it.  I should have just taken the damn stockings down, but I had half a brain and was usually lucky if I was clothed and coherent.  

At some point I had had enough of the Christmas tree.  The Yeti suggested I leave it up 'til next year - "It's been up this long," he said - but I stubbornly wanted to maintain the specialness of Christmas and, let's face it, that dusty tree was not very magical at this point.  Plus, "The Year of the Christmas Tree" sounded like a bad Hallmark movie.  So I had intentions of taking it down the weekend after St. Patrick's Day... but you know how that goes.  

And then it was Easter.  

We Skyped with both sides of the family on Easter.  Both sides commented on the stockings.  

The next day I had all the ornaments off the tree and the other miscellaneous decorations packed away.  The tree itself took another week or so, because retrieving the bins needed to store it required the Yeti, and he's worse than I am.  

But it's been up, and done, for a little while now.  And good thing too, because we're getting a jumperoo and we can use the space (baby stuff is like The Blob - it just keeps growing).  

Next year I'm thinking I might do something entirely different for our Christmas tree - like getting all plastic and wood ornaments that are safe from mobile near-toddlers.  Maybe I'll even get one of those little, brightly colored trees from Target while I'm shaking things up.  

Then the next year, by the time I pull out our traditional decorations, I'll be ready to look at them again.  It wasn't The Year of the Christmas Tree, but it was long enough.