I spent most of the day on Saturday putting Christmas away…finally! Had hoped to do this over New Year’s weekend, but came down with an awful cold instead! The cold has hung around for almost 2 weeks, and I think I’m almost rid of most of it now. Got everything down outside last weekend, but that just about did me in (even with Patrick’s help) so I gave up on the inside stuff. So on Saturday I just started in and didn’t stop until it was all packed up…5 hours later!

Today I unpacked all the carnival glass and other tidbits and dusted all the furniture as I put everything back in place. I would have rather been outdoors since the temps have been in the 80’s, but I just had to get all this finished. Tomorrow I’m off for MLK Day so will haul all the crates out to the garage and then will finally spend some time outdoors trimming back my roses! I have tons of lemons and tangelos right now, so will also try to get some of them picked so I can take them to work before they are too ripe.

I’m actually glad that all the Christmas decorating is over. I love the way my house looks when it’s decorated but it just takes so much effort to do the decorating and then so much more to put it all away. I know it would be extremely difficult not to have the house decorated at Christmas, but I think I need to start paring things back somewhat. I’m getting tired of spending so much time doing this every year. For now, though, it’s over and I can forget about how much time it takes until next year.

Meanwhile, my house and all the glassware is a lot cleaner than it was before all the decorating happened. Thankfully, I washed all the carnival glass and Occupied Japan pieces before packing them up. Still have more cleaning to do, but that will have to wait until I get the outdoor stuff done tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have time for some of it tomorrow but, if I don’t, it will have to wait another week. One of these days maybe I’ll have it all cleaned at the same time.