The Post-Holiday Blues
Although New Year’s Eve is still a few days away, the holidays are more or less over with for another year. With the end of the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season comes, for me, a bit of sadness.
The embodiment of this sadness is the removal of the Christmas tree.
As a kid, my mom usually took down the Christmas tree the first day back at school after the holidays. It would disappear while we were out of the house and, while it was momentarily weird to see the house back to normal, it wasn’t a particularly big deal.
Years later, when my mom rejoined the paid workforce, she would usually take down the tree a few days after Christmas (the weekend following New Year’s Eve, usually). My brothers and I would usually be in the house while this was happening.
And while seeing the tree come apart was always a little bit sad, it didn’t prepare me for the day that I had to take down my own Christmas tree for the first time. That was a strange and sad day. The end of the holidays. The end of the season. The end of “good cheer” and guilt-free eating and drinking (I have a tendency to get started early during the holidays—Christmas Day, in particular, usually starts with a coffee-and-Baileys).
The day that I take down my Christmas tree is one of the saddest days of the year. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit—reeking of nostalgia and sentimentality as it does—but it’s true.
That day is still about a week away, but it looms on the horizon. I’m not quite ready for the holidays to end, but that’s the way that life goes, sometimes.
On the bright side, the end of the holiday season means that summer is that much closer to returning.
I bought myself a real-life one this year. It’s huge (I think so anyway) and will take some effort to plant in my garden. But for some reason that makes it a bit easier to take it down.
It does look sad to see all those discarded Christmas trees out in the road though. Do the kids gather them up and make a huge bonfire of them come New Year’s Eve?
A live tree that will go into the garden does sound like it will be easier to take down. I didn’t know you could do that. I assumed that real trees had most of the root system hacked off before they even got to the tree lot, since the root systems of pine trees are often very extensive. Am I wrong about that?
As for the kids gathering them up for a bonfire, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m sure it happens. I suspect that it’s something that happens more often in smaller communities than in the city, though, if only because they’re aren’t as many places in the city were you can have a huge bonfire without someone calling the fire department or the bylaw cops on you.
Buy a little ficus ‘bonsai’ and keep that sucker up year round with an ornament on it
NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW.
I actually do have a bonsai tree that Rosemary gave me for my birthday. I can’t remember what kind it is, but I could totally do that. I was actually trying to find a set of mini Christmas lights for those little “Christmas Town” collectibles to hang from the bonsai (at Sara’s suggestion), but I couldn’t find any.