As part of the commitment the blog makes to serving the needs of the public in general and our readers in particular, I offer the following valuable and timely reminder: the time has come to take down your Christmas decorations.
I recognize that there’s no carved-in-stone rule on this. Nor should there be, either before or after Christmas. Just as some folks hang up their lights and inflate their snowmen shortly before Thanksgiving – earlier than that actually is pushing it, by the way – so others prefer to wait until a week or two later. Indeed, judging by the fact that some tree lots still stay in business until December 23 or 24, at least some people’s holiday traditions involve waiting until the last minute. Either that or there are some lot attendants in the world who get a strange thrill out of sitting in the cold and staring at dead trees.
Different households have different take-down times that generally correspond to their outlooks on life. Without naming names, I know at least one person who made a custom every year of yanking the tree down and carting it out even as the last scraps of wrapping paper from the kids’ presents were still settling to earth. This strategy tends to say “thank goodness this is over for another year. Now let’s eat supper, watch football and pretend that none of this ever happened.” Slightly more common is the practice of packing up and throwing out on or around New Years Day. Assuming the weather permits and the hangover’s not too bad to make for treacherous trips up and down the ladder, the start of the new year is as good a time as any to go ahead and take care of it. The holidays – at least the ones you get off from work – are officially over. It makes for a nice psychological break from the old year and its bric-a-brac. And if nothing else, doing it on the same day every year helps you to remember to do it, sort of like changing the batteries in your smoke alarms when daylight savings time starts and ends.
Still, Jan. 1 might be a little early for some folks. Sometimes it’s hard to give up that special holiday feeling. Sometimes it’s too cold out to troop around the yard gathering up plastic reindeer. And there are legitimate religious reasons for waiting awhile, too. For example, many households wait until the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6 before officially calling a halt.
But for those of you who still at this late date have a smiling Santa hanging off your porch, I think you’re past the point of reasonable excuse. The kids have been back in school for awhile now. The weather’s been a little spotty, but we’ve had enough pleasant days that surely you could have taken advantage of one of them.
Perhaps you’re waiting for the Feast of the Conversion of Paul. If so, why? Wouldn’t it be better to stick to celebrations that are somehow directly related to Christmas? Otherwise heck, why not just leave the mistletoe out until the Feast of the Assumption in August?
Maybe we need to come up with a new feast day for you. How about the Feast of the Guys Who Showed Up Really Late for the Nativity? There’s no explicit biblical support for such a holiday, but you’ve got to figure that at least some of the shepherds were coming from a couple of towns over and thus took a little extra time to show up. Just because they aren’t mentioned in the gospels doesn’t mean that they weren’t there, however late they might have been.
Of course we’ll need some ceremonies and customs to go with this new holiday. I suggest that celebrants get a six pack, drink one, and then go outside carrying the remaining five by the empty ring. With all the lights out, wander slowly around your house looking in the windows and chanting “where’s everybody at?”
Ceremony complete, it’s time for dinner. After all, what would a feast day be without a feast? Unfortunately, the appropriate chow for this particular event is “the bread of you-should-have-made-a-little-more-haste.” Dishes must be things that are traditionally all that’s left after the first couple of hours of a party, such as cocktail wieners and a nut-covered cheese ball surrounded by sesame crackers.
Sound like less fun than a barrel of monkeys? There’s an easy way to escape this dire fate. Just take down your decorations already.
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