Clearing away Christmas decorations is always a faintly gloomy affair. As you take down each ornament from the now dry and curling tree, there’s none of the pleasure of greeting an old friend, as there was when you pulled it out of its box. Three weeks ago, everyone was competing to hang his and her favorites: “Oh! The glass heart!” and “I get to hang the star!” and “This year it’s my turn to put up the Bad Penguin!” — this last ornament being an inoffensive crystal bird with a single flipper. The nursery-school handprints made of construction paper and strung on yarn, fragile blown-glass spheres, half-tarnished sparkly strands dating back to the Sixties (aka, “the ancient ancestral tinsel”) — as each object emerges there’s a feeling of pulling treasure from a time capsule. Even the most ragged felt-and-glue angel, though its beauty may be invisible to the eye, brings a sense of affirmation and continuity with Christmases past.
In reverse, the process lacks magic. The baubles come off the tree at high speed, since no one needs to think carefully about where, exactly, they need to go. Pretty quickly they’re stacking up every which way in boxes. They begin to seem like a burden, another irritant on the to-do list. Unwinding Christmas lights from the crackling boughs and struggling to find some rational way of storing them until next December — and there is no rational way, which is why we struggle — is a total bore, only marginally more maddening than putting them up in the first place (no affirmation there).
Meanwhile, oddly enough, the children who could not tear themselves away from the living room when the tree was going up are now rather hard to find. They keep finding reasons to drift off. “I’ve just got to check something,” one will say, stepping lightly into the front hall. “I’ll be right back,” says another, disappearing up the stairs.
Do they come right back, after checking something? No, they do not. When discovered in their rooms by a search party, they have the nerve to look surprised: “Oh, but I have midterms coming up. And you did tell me to study.”
In some ways it is better if the children are out of the way when the saddest moment comes, when you gingerly topple the tree and haul its poor Yuletide carcass out to the side of the road.
Every January, our Christmas tree leaves a trail of needles through the house that feels like a reproach, as if its little fingers were desperately trying to hold on as we drag it away to ignominy and oblivion. Once we had a 4-year-old daughter who was so distraught — she saw the tree’s point of view — that, weeping furiously, she bodily tried to prevent us taking the thing outside.
The tree gets its revenge, though: The ornaments may have been packed away, and the strings of lights jammed into a bag, but however thoroughly we vacuum, we are still finding the odd spruce needle well into February.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
