Taking Down Christmas

 It's 2014! I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year. Hopefully you aren't reading this from a  hospital bed or jail cell after a night of unabashed celebration. I'm not all that much of a holiday fan. Jan and I are pretty low key. I spent New Years Eve watching The Twilight Zone marathon on TV and Jan and Jen played cards for a few hours. We had a little champagne mixed with orange juice and munched on some unhealthy snacks. I'm a real sucker for jalapeno poppers. I was being cheap so I bought some Western Family Cheese Puffs. Usually Western Family products are pretty good. These cheese puffs looked great inside the package, but looks are deceiving. Each one was the size of a  link sausage, but the flavor just wasn't there. It would have been false advertising it they had been called cheese flavored puffs. I don't what flavor they were, but definitely not something that will rocket them to the top of the snack line.Sometimes you just have to go with the name brand products, especially when it comes to snacks. My daughter Autumn is visiting and has taken it upon herself to take down the decorations inside. I took down the lights and garland that was festooning the two porches. It's amazing how much faster it is to take them down than to put them up. Looking around at the stuff littering the floor and counters and benches and couch, I can see why retailers love Christmas so much. We had two wreaths for the doors, yards and yards of assorted colored garland, strand after strand of lights, ornaments, phony poinsettia plants, fabric snowmen and ceramic figures for the manger scene, a topiary tree, a Christmas tree, large red bows for the porch,red ribbons for packages and red birds for the tree, gift bags, and wrapping paper and labels, push pins and ornament hangers and suction cups for the windows,Scotch tape for packages and packaging tape for mailing, and then you have to buy something to store all this stuff in. Of course every year there's the annual lighting of the strands to see if they work or not. I usually end up throwing away at least one string of lights. If I could figure out how to fix these things I could probably make enough to retire in some place like Arizona or Florida. My favorite thing is when half the lights work and half don't. I'm so cheap I don't like to throw out something that works- even if it's half way, but as of late I've decided that for the amount of time that I spend trying to find out why they aren't working, I could go to the store and buy new ones and save myself the frustration. No doubt there is some smart person somewhere grabbing out all the strands of Christmas lights from the dump and salvaging the copper or aluminum or whatever they're using to manufacture them. They probably send them off to Christmas Land, China or some such place and they'll be back in the stores next year where we can buy them all over again. Well, I guess it's time to gather the all the garland,and ornaments, lights and figurines and assorted other doo-dads and hoo-ha, stick the whole mess in a couple plastic bins and squeeze myself into the attic crawl space where these goodies will remain hidden until Christmas comes again. Gotta love the holidays!