Monday, January 11, 2010

Today I packed up our Christmas decorations. I had my daughter get the lights down outside and we cleared our porch together. She brought in the plastic tubs and I packed up the decorations from inside the house.

As I was packing I looked at the things that were left in the tubs, unused as decorations this year, and was able to let go of several of them.

Thinking about putting the decorations away seemed like a really big deal and it caused me anxiety. That's the main reason why I have put it off this long. Lots of emotions came to the surface and my perfectionistic tendencies too. I was happy to be able to pack up the tubs myself.

It's not that no one would help me, it's that I want to do it my way (carefully wrapping up some of the items) -- laying them in the tub in a systematic way. Not only that, but I pulled every thing out and packed categories together.

This year we put up less decorations and I was very thankful that it didn't take me as long as I had dreaded that it would. Getting rid of decorations that I didn't use made it go faster too.

As I was packing, I was thinking about how every year I want the focus to be more on the birth of Christ and God's loving gift to us. My decorations would really scale down if that is all I kept. I'll contemplate that. Now that they are all together, it will be easy to purge them again if I should decide to.