I haven’t lived this long without learning that there are three
things you can count on in life: 1) death, 2) taxes, 3) and
leftover holiday decorations.
I haven’t lived this long without learning that there are three things you can count on in life: 1) death, 2) taxes, 3) and leftover holiday decorations. Life being what it is, you might as well give up trying to control numbers one and two, but you’d think that number three wouldn’t be too hard to manage. You would think.
However, no matter how hard you try, some objects simply refuse to be put away. No one knows why this happens, but sometime in mid-February, you’ll look behind the sofa or underneath the ottoman and find, say, a crocheted snowflake ornament that you swear you’d put away months before.
This leaves you with two options. The first is to immediately go out to the garage, haul out all fifteen plastic containers, and put it back into the appropriate one. The second is to “store it somewhere” for 12 months until the holiday it belongs to comes back around again. Now, let me just stop right here and say that you must think long and hard about this. There are pivotal decisions in a person’s life and this, my friends, is one of them. The decision you make now could possibly affect the quality of your life forever.
Take, for example, the time I found a rather persistent paper mache turkey named Mr. Gobbles hiding behind the magazine rack. Since all of our Thanksgiving decorations were already stored away, I tossed him on the shelf in the hall closet. The very next day Mr. Gobbles appeared on top of the VCR. So I put him in a kitchen cupboard. He reappeared underneath the Christmas tree. I put him on top of the dryer. Then we found him in my son’s room, stuffed inside a sock. Lucky for us, he eventually worked his way into the stuffed animal hammock in my daughter’s room where he now lives all year round.
Then there’s my friend Julie. The very second after she packed away all 17 boxes of Christmas decorations in the garage last year, she found a tiny, wooden sheep wedged underneath the ottoman that had somehow escaped from the miniature manger scene. She unthinkingly tossed it in her silverware drawer, where it fell out every time she needed a fork. She lived like this, transferring the sheep back and forth three times a day, for 11 months only to have it mysteriously disappear in November, right before it was time to put the Christmas decorations back out. Coincidence? I think not.
Maybe I should do what my relaxed friend Teri does. She just incorporates whatever’s left into her household decor. At any time of year you can go to her house and find a cluster of wooden angels artfully hanging in the ficus tree or a lone plastic Easter egg wedged inside a crystal glass in the china cabinet.
Or I could follow the example of my friend Shirley, who keeps an empty space in her closet ready for renegade holiday objects. But while this may sound like an ideal solution, the problem is that, the very second you’re not paying attention, all of the extra bags of Easter Grass and plastic jack-o-lanterns will take over the shoe section and then move on to conquer the pre-pregnancy wardrobe. And before you know it, your whole closet will be filled with leftover holiday decorations.
If my past experience has taught me anything at all, it’s that no matter what you do, yo”ll always, ALWAYS have leftover holiday decorations. This is because, you see, they have a mind of their own. The best you can hope for is to figure out a way to fight back. So that’s why this year I’m tossing rebellious objects on top of the dryer. Partly to keep them under control and partly because, like everything else in my laundry room, they’ll eventually disappear to live the rest of their days among the missing socks and dust bunnies.
Cruel? Maybe. But, sometimes, with leftover holiday decorations, you have to show them who is in charge.
Debbie Farmer’s column appears every Monday.
