Of taking down decorations and packing everything away for the year tomorrow. It will take a few days to complete between my spouse and I, reversing the time and effort of putting it all up of course. We managed to get everything put out over a long weekend this year, which is a bit longer than it used to take us. Once upon a time we could do the entire house in one day, the Friday after Thanksgiving being our usual day of choice. But neither of us is that young anymore, lol. I mean, we’re not ancient - but we are no longer in our twenties or thirties either, and time definitely takes it’s toll.

Our annual process of decorating has always been that I would pull everything up out of our cellar with the help of my sons; we keep everything packed up in RubberMaid totes, or bagged up in 55 gallon drum liners for the larger items, excepting the two artificial trees which are packed up in tree bags. Everything gets stacked neatly on our front porch while I start at one end of the house and clean everything, with all of the regular knick-knacks and such being placed on our dining room table as I clean. Once one room is done, my wife starts behind me and starts putting out all of the decorations while packing up the stuff we don’t use during the holidays into the same totes that our Christmas comes out of. We then put those back into the cellar until after the holidays. Some years back I created a spread sheet to track what is in each tote, the totes being numbered of course, so that we know which ones contain what and where they need to go. Our cellar is also organized and mapped out so that the individual totes are easy to find. What can I say - between being an engineer and the fact that one of my specialties is logistics, I can’t help but be just a little anally retentive when it comes to organization, lol.

Once the interior of the house is done, I have to spend about half a day doing the outside decorations. I can usually count on one or two of my sons to help moving the totes, and in setting up the outside decorations as well. In fact, this year it was truly a family affair as two of my sons, my daughter-in-law, and my future daughter-in-law all showed up to help out with the outside decorations. Of course, personally I think they showed up because they got a free dinner out of it afterward, lol. But the help is definitely appreciated - especially when it is really cold outside.

So tomorrow we will start doing the whole thing in reverse, but we will take a few more days to do it - probably a week total. As our temps will be below freezing for at least the next two to three weeks based on the current forecast, the outside decorations may come down the same way, a little at a time. I have zero desire to spend the better part of a day outside freezing my ass off (it took me a long time to get my cute little backside and I can’t afford to lose any of it, lol) just to get everything packed up and put away in one day. So I will probably just take down a few things each day until they are all put away.

Luckily, we don’t have a lot of snow to deal with right now, but we are getting a little lake effect snow pretty much daily right now; we are far enough east to be on the fringes of the lake effect, so we don’t get hammered with the snow - but the cold and wind are still prevalent, just without the steady snowfall, being more snow showers for us rather than steady snowfall.

With Thanksgiving being so late this year, we are really in no rush to take down everything - we wanted to enjoy everything for a while. But it does look kind of lazy to leave them up for too long, so we do have to get started this week.

And yes, I agree - once the decorations are down we have three to four months of drab, dead looking winter to deal with.