The end of the holiday season for us comes when we take our Christmas lights down, which we did this weekend. We put them up the weekend after Thanksgiving, so they’ve been up for six weeks, which has to be a record for us.
We have two artificial trees, a big one which goes in the living room so it can be seen from the street, and a smaller one in our family room so we can enjoy the lights while watching television. (It is still a little weird to me that our TV is not in fact in our living room. Almost as weird as the fact that we own three couches, even if one of them is in bad need of replacement.) Then we put up lights around the first floor of the house outside. I added a few more this year, and by my count we had 23 strands of lights up. I think almost all of them are low-power LED lights now, except for maybe a yellow strand and a white one which contains some blinking lights. I actually prefer the rich color of LED lights to incandescent ones, so it’s a win all around as far as I’m concerned.
The holidays were somewhat bittersweet this year: My mom is having some issues, which both my sister and I have been dealing with (her more than me, as she made two trips up on the last two weeks to see her; my role has been in making a lot of phone calls). And Debbi got sick the week of Christmas and has continued to be sick through this weekend. She went to the doctor on Friday and got some antibiotics, which seem to be working already. I thought she’d just had the nasty cold that’s been going around (which I had over Thanksgiving), but apparently hers was worse than that. Hopefully she’ll be better soon.
We still got out to see Christmas lights the week leading up to Christmas, though. We have a lot of nice ones in our area to go view.
We also had a good holiday break, as much as possible with Debbi not feeling great. We got out to the coast and walked the new Devil’s Slide coastal trail, which is about as much fun to walk as the old highway along the cliffs was to drive. We also got together with some neighbors for drinks, and got up to Cal Academy for a day with our friends Chad & Camille and their kids. (Doing the museum with kids is quite different from doing it without kids!)
But this weekend we took down the lights and put everything back in the shed for another year. It’s a bit sad each year when we do it, but it’s nice to reclaim the space from the trees and have the house get back to normal. And, as they say, it’s the fact that it only comes around once a year that makes it special.
