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).
