January is the longest month of the year. I know it only has 31 days, the same as seven of our twelve months, but somehow it’s hard to believe that sluggish January is the same length as zippy July. For me, work and late night coaching (7-9/9:30) begin to wear on me. There are no more days off. It’s cold and dark out. My kids head back to school, leaving the house empty. The Christmas decorations come down. It’s a tough month to trudge through. 

Since I mentioned the Christmas decorations, I should cover their removal, Haldeman style. Travis will start bugging me to take them down the day after Christmas. I can’t bear to part with them yet, so I make him hold off until after New Year’s. On January 1st or 2nd, we take the easy stuff and collect it in the entrance way of the house, making it a gauntlet to enter or exit the house. The cats take full advantage of this and escape with regularity. Any quiet evening can be punctuated with a yell of “CAT OUT,” followed by a rush out the door into the cold to catch the escapee. One cat can’t go out because it has health issues and the other cat doesn’t come home. On the first weekend in the new year, we get ambitious, and take some of the more difficult items down, like the lights wrapped around the banister and the ornaments on the tree that don’t need a ladder for removal. We bring the ladder into the house and leave it next to the tree, but don’t actually remove any of the higher ornaments. Things are haphazardly put in the boxes that we stashed openly in the master bedroom (for easy retrieval, of course). The boxes are left laying around the living room. 

It is usually around this time that we invite a friend over. Then we realize that living among the boxes of Christmas ornaments, a half naked Christmas tree with its buddy, the ladder, the gauntlet by the front door, and random decorations that didn’t make the removal list is not the normal way to live. So, we pick a corner of the living room and stack all the full boxes of ornaments. We hastily put the empty boxes (there are still decorations around the house and on the top half of the tree) back in the master bedroom. We pretend that everyone has a ladder in the living room. Yes, I left the ladder next to the tree with our friends over. It was a conversation piece. 

At this point, we wait until the next weekend. By the second weekend, the llama Christmas tree is dropping needles like crazy because I haven’t been watering it for a couple weeks and we’ve had it since the day after Thanksgiving, so I want it out of the house. Travis took down the ornaments at the top of the tree while I was at the all day swim and dive meet extravaganza that is the conference meet. We waited until Sunday, while basking in the glow of football on the television, to move the furniture so we could labor through the house to get the 13 foot tree out the front door, dropping needles along the path so we could find our way back. We put the tree on the edge of the driveway, where it remains, and vacuum and sweep the endless needles. We will still find some needles in July, when we are having a cocktail and enjoying the warm weather. 

So, right now, we have boxes of ornaments stacked in the corner of the living room, a 13 foot Christmas tree on the edge of our driveway, some lights that I didn’t want to part with yet, still hanging around the windows, and a handful of empty boxes in the master bedroom. Hopefully, those boxes and the tree go before summer. Does anyone know what we do with a Christmas tree here in Indiana? This is the first year since the move that we have a real tree. I forgot to mention that we hauled some of the ornaments and out two large fake trees and two small fake trees to the girls’ bedroom, where they remain. The girls are at college anyway. And the attic access is in their closet. 

So this is how we spend time in January. Perhaps my more organized friends de-Christmas their houses in a more organized fashion. I plan to be done by summer. And we didn’t even do outdoor decorations this year.