By Bob Holeman

Christmas decorations.

Let’s compare this with Thanksgiving dinner.  Momma spends days, maybe weeks in planning and excited anticipation for a wonderful family gathering around the dining room table.  A day or so in advance, she creates her traditional pecan pie, sweet potato casserole and green bean casserole with the crispy canned onions on top.  She might even set the table ahead of time with her special holiday napkins and the fancy plates and glasses so she won’t have to rush at that on Thanksgiving Day.

Momma’s up early Thursday, taking the turkey out of the refrigerator where it’s been thawing since Tuesday to get it ready for the oven.  Rolls have to be prepared.  Dressing for the turkey and gravy, for sure.  Salad’s optional…too healthful for this family.  Maybe a quick slaw.

Mealtime arrives and, love them though you might, the kids and grandkids swarm in like locusts, eat everything that isn’t moving and ask permission to go back outside to play football with Grandpa or play games on their pads.  Momma’s left with the dishes and turkey bones to start a pot of gumbo.  Still with a smile on her face because of family.

So Diane and I took down our Christmas lights last week.  The parallel I’m trying to paint is the amount of planning compared to the duration of the event.  Diane plans, I procrastinate.  By mid-December we had our outside lights up.  Diane already had our indoor decorations in place.  She decided that since no family would be coming to visit, perhaps our big tree should stay in the attic.  It is a large amount of work to light and decorate.

But we have a smaller, genuine 1960s-era gold aluminum tree from her folks, also stored in the attic.  I dusted off the box and was amazed that the gold aluminum fronds on each limb are still in great shape after so many years of disuse.  She set it up in the dining room window and hung the white satin balls that came with the tree. I found a spotlight in the storeroom and we were in business.

Outside, we had strands of white mini lights coiled around the pillars, strands of colored lights randomly laid in the front porch bushes while more white lights shined in the kitchen-side bushes.  I’m happy to report that only one old strand blew out while we were putting them up and a second new strand went out during the showtime season.

But guess what?  Once Christmas is passed, it’s like a light switch turned off.  Some un-decorate the day after Christmas, the traditional “Boxing Day.”  Others hold onto their lighting through New Years.  We did but that was mostly my own procrastination.  Diane started putting things up pretty quickly after our return from family in Tennessee.  After we got out last week’s Journal, Diane convinced me that it was time to get down the lights.  True, they hadn’t been lighted since New Year’s Eve but it was time to get them into their boxes and back in the attic.

The Christmas season is gone.  Perhaps we can hold onto the joy and hope of that season as we proceed into 2024.