So Christmas is over, (almost?) everyone is happy with what they got, and it's already that time to put the decorations and lights away. But, where and when to start? With Christmas being the second to last holiday of the year with New Years' closing in afterward, you'd have to help clean up everything out of the living room, and taking the tree right back out, and it might be a hassle.

The first thing to go could be those Christmas unwrappings, boxes and wrapping paper are no doubt strewn through the house like a hurricane just came in and messed up the place due to excitement of others opening up everything right beside the tree. For my family, it was either me or the siblings taking them out each year, taking turns to see who was next in emptying the house of them.

Next are those many, many decorations inside and out of the house. Sometimes they were stored in the attic, sometimes they were sent to the garage in case our attic was too small. We had boxes of ornaments and bulbs, usually too many for the tree, leading us to only put certain ones of choice on the tree to begin with. The decorations I never looked forward to were the lights.

Sure I wasn't the one on the ladder taking them down, but making sure they didn't get tangled and put in accidental knots was a challenge if the string was long enough, or if we had to put more than one string in a single box. My older brother was out holding the ladder always, and afterward my stepdad was making sure that I had the right string of lights i the right boxes.

Speaking of which, we often reused older boxes for our Christmas decorations. If boxes deteriorated, we simply got more. I still recall one Christmas when my stepdad used to have a box of model cars, during a move my mom wrote in marker "Tim's crap" and called it a day. Then a few years later, we used that box for our stockings. Joking aside, it made for a good convenience to save time for us to not have to drive around some stores asking for unused boxes for ourselves to use.

Any leftover food could either be a convenience for a later meal, or a problem for space in the fridge. This was especially the case if we had a big turky or ham with plenty left over. My parents never thought about investing in a mini fridge to prepare for this, so if we didn't eat the last foods fast enough during the remainder of the week they would end up throwing the rest out.

As for the tree, we sometimes went back and forth to either take it out of the house before the last week of December, or just after the 31st, since Christmas was the highlight of the month. We rarely went with using a real tree (for the sap, of course) so when it came to sending the fake ones out, we had to take them apart, with the top part coming in three separate pieces, then stuffing it in a tall box, and dragging it somewhere in the attic or garage where the box was out of the way.

What was your experience of cleaning up after Christmas? Leave a comment and as always, see you next article!