I hosted book club last week, and therefore was forced to totally spruce up my house. Now I'm realizing just how much I love my space when it isn't cluttered up with random books, mail, magazines, etc. I've been fighting off a lingering cold, so I confess my Christmas tree is still up, but once it comes down (hopefully tonight) I'll have a nice bit of real estate cleared out under the windows that will add to the uncluttered happiness of my current living room. I like my house this way, and I want it to stay this way, so I'm making myself a promise that I'll take a few minutes every evening to clear up clutter to prevent it from building up again. Pinkie swear!
Relatedly, the cleared out living room will actually give me space to work on my January Jumpstart project this week, so I might in fact be able to get something turned in before the Jan 21 deadline. If I get the tree down tonight, I should be able to start on the nightstand project tomorrow. Since I'm hoping to spruce up the existing finish rather than to strip it off, I should be able to make good progress every evening so that I'm finished before the weekend. I'll keep you posted!
7 comments:
I will pinkie swear with you, as I've been thinking along the same lines.
Our tree (being fake) stays up until Candlemas, 40 days after Christmas, which is when Mary would have been ritually cleansed and accepted back into the Temple after giving birth.
nice wende. I once had a tree still up at Easter- undecorated except for lights, but I just liked the look of it (my tree is also fake obviously...)
thanks for pinkie-swearing with me! hey- you know you're in the same city as my friend Heather from Bacon Unwrapped?
Okay, I tried to post a comment and got a "duplication error". I'll try again.
I'm with you on both liking a chaos-free environment and needing to discipline myself to keep the chaos at bay.
I've started a bit of blogging about setting up some workable routines for that, that aren't FlyLady. We'll see how that goes, and where that goes...
My tree usually comes down on at Epiphany, that being the end of Christmas by at least one conception of the liturgy.
And, I'm with you, the clutter clearing removes a huge amount of psychological weight from a room. And keeping up with it can be harder than it seems it ought to be.
Not the Christmas tree, but the outdoor lights--those I leave us as long as possible. They're just so cheery and that's way more important and even necessary during the dull dark days of February.
I didn't know that about Candlemas. Interesting. How close do you get to lent doing things that way? I suppose that would depend...
Candlemas (Feb 1) is always before the start of Lent. This year's Easter is as early as it's possible to be, and Ash Wednesday is February 6.
So it's definitely keeping the creche up past the Church-approved Christmas season, but it's liturgically defensible.
We put up the tree around the 2nd Sunday of Advent (that's the week of Isaiah 11:1-10 in Yr A, "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots") and add the creche around the 3rd Sunday. But we haven't done Advent candles at home in years...
I just got the last of Christmas put away and stored in the pump room. If I had my way, the tree and all the other stuff would be down Christmas afternoon. If my husband had his way- it would still be up right now. We compromise and it gets taken down around New Years.
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