Traditionally, festive decorations should be taken down by the twelfth night as Christmas comes to a close. There is a little confusion about precisely when the twelfth night is but according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is “the evening of the 5th of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany” so I’m going with that – and decorations are coming down today. It’s a sad day in our household when the Christmas decorations get taken down because we’ve all enjoyed the festive period so much, and the dismantling of our xmas display means that we’re all back to work and its another 11 months until we start getting excited about Christmas again. And for me, I don’t even have a birthday to look forward to during the year, because mine is in December!
So I try to make the most of clearing Christmas away with some very organised packing and a full top-to-bottom house tidying and clean – yes, my first spring-clean of the year! First off, I like to make sure that my Christmas decorations are in tip-top condition and securely packed away so that they will make it safely to the following Christmas. So I get out the shallow boxes for baubles and wrap the special or delicate ones in paper or foam packaging (saved from all my parcels throughout the year) and parcel tape the boxes closed so that nothing can get in to destroy my decorations during the year. My Christmas lights are wound onto rectangles of cardboard to prevent tangling (and save me a job next December) and my over-sized glass fairy lights are bubble wrapped to prevent breakages while in storage during the year.
And tomorrow I’ll be dusting, vacuuming, scrubbing and wiping to get the house back to its pre-Christmas glory and clean off the 2 weeks of neglect whilst I’ve sat around doing nothing over the holidays. Then, its back to real life and the 354 days-to-christmas countdown begins…
