It's Beginning to Look a Lot Less Like Christmas

Well, here it is again, that time of year that I look forward to so much.  Time to take the Christmas crap down again.

Mrs. Smoot is always very, very anxious to get the Christmas stuff put away.  I honestly think that if she had her way, she'd be tearing down the tree while we're unwrapping presents on Christmas morning.  It is good that she is enthusiastic about getting it taken down, because if it were up to me, I'd probably put it off so long that we could wind up keeping it up until next Christmas.

I'm also very glad that she is organized and meticulous about putting stuff away.  She has boxes that are clearly marked with their contents, and she neatly organizes all of the ornaments as she takes them off the tree.  It's a good thing that we don't have that old fashioned tinsel on the tree; she'd probably organize it by length and sort it into color-coded boxes or something.

She knows that it is best to just let me stick to the manly part of the job, so my primary role is to take all of the boxes downstairs.  If she relied on me for anything more complicated than that, she knows I'd just grab the tree -- ornaments and all, with the electrical cords still connected to the outlets -- and I'd use whatever force necessary to shove it down the steps, and plow it into the closet, and that would be that.

Sooner or later, though, I will have to tackle the dismantling of the outdoor lighting.  Mrs. Smoot has no part in messing with that.  I'm not nearly as angry with the lights since we got all new LED strings this season.  Every bulb remained lit for the entire holiday (with the exception of the string that some moron decided to steal from our shrub), so I actually have very good intentions of packing things away very neatly for next year... unlike how I did it last year.

Of course the problem is that the weather is crappy, and we're not even supposed to get up to 30 degrees for at least another week.  So even if I actually wanted to go out and fart around with the lights in the freezing cold, they're probably pretty well frozen to the shrubs and so forth.  I'm guessing it's not a good idea to go out there with a blow torch to try to help thaw them.

It also doesn't help that I basically booby-trapped the lights by using tie-downs to fasten them to the bushes in order to thwart future thefts.  I remember thinking, "I'm going to hate myself for doing this when it comes time to take these down in January."

If you drive by and see that my lights are still up, just assume that my excuse is that I'm leaving them up in celebration of Groundhog Day, Easter, July 4th, Arbor Day, etc.  It'll be festive.