Christmas Clean Up - Week 1 of 34 Weeks of Clean

Week 1 of 34 Weeks of Clean - Christmas Decorations

This post is a little late, and will be light on photos because I did Christmas clean up around here before I thought to post about it and join in the "34 Weeks of Clean" challenge at Family, Faith and Fridays Blog.

So, one of our family traditions, implemented by mom and dad and not necessarily appreciated by the rest of the family is our practice of cleaning up our Christmas decorations on the 1st day of the year. This is practical for us because 1) it is a holiday, and therefore 2) everyone is home to help.

We started by disassembling the tree onto the dining room table. From there we separate ornaments according to who they belong to. I came to see the wisdom of this method about a decade ago, when my oldest was approaching adulthood. It had occurred to me that at some point each child would be setting up their own household, and they (and I) would want their personal ornaments to go with them. These ornaments start with ornaments they made at co-op ornament events, and expanded to include specialty ornaments purchased for each of them each year. I certainly cannot keep track of what belongs to whom, and boxing them each year means they are "labelled" the next year when they come out of storage, and that helps us to eventually keep them with the right kiddo.

Once the tree is "empty", we drag it outside. Usually, as we dump it off the side of the deck toward where it will go out the gate for recycling, another ornament(s) is found on the tree. This year was no exception. Didn't break, though, so all was good.

Effort is made to locate and put away every decoration. When the decorations were brought out, other decorations were stored (in the Christmas storage boxes) to make room for Christmas. These non-Christmas decorations are returned to their normal "homes" as the manger scene, et. al. are put away.

Inevitably certain items get overlooked, and these decorations will eventually end up in the attic near the Christmas decoration boxes, but they won't fit inside the boxes this year. Time to declutter those decorations again! But I didn't take any time to do that this year. So the wall-quilt Nana made,

and the wreath on the door


have yet to be put away, but other than that we're finished with clean-up assignment #1 for the 34 Weeks of Clean challenge. (And I think maybe the wrapping paper hasn't quite made it to the attic yet, either... Oops! Just found one more straggler:

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you keep finding little decorations here and there for weeks!