Merry Christmas!

I’ll probably start on the 4th of Jan, only because school term starts for me with a training day on the 5th.
But generally I wait until around then to take stuff down. Some of the fairy lights will stay up all year, they just don’t get plugged in / switched on again until December next year.
I do have to keep an eye on when the Christmas tree will be collected by the kerbside collection service, but it’s usually the week after 12th night, to allow for the rescheduled bin collections due to the bank holidays.

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We always wait until after then as well. We will burn a piece of frankincense or myrrh to celebrate Epiphany. Since we’re so intentional about it, it doesn’t feel like stuff that needs doing at all until then.

On the other hand, at my parents house, we’d often get up on Boxing Day mid-morning and they’d already have the tree tossed out on the lake and everything else packed away. :scream:

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Your parents are my people.

For me it makes no sense to wait until I’m back to homeschooling and driving people to activities to add on a chunk of work. If I could get someone else to do it, I’d leave it up, too.
:christmas_tree::arrow_right::evergreen_tree:

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Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice? :heart_eyes:

On 1/7, DH and the kids will carry all the Christmas decor boxes to the appropriate rooms for me (they are all marked). Then I’ll just undecorate a room or two at a time until it’s done. The kids will help a bit with some of it (like taking everything off the tree) but aren’t great at packing so it’s 90% me.

The big one is to find a nice weather day with a chunk of uninterrupted time for my biannual tree climb to get the outside lights down. :laughing:

I also use it as an opportunity to dust and whatnot, so there is much “give a mouse a cookie” that happens. I just try to have it all down by the end of the month. :joy::joy::joy:

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It’s not that the grill won’t cook the prime rib. It just takes way longer to cook because the Weber has trouble maintaining temperature because of the cold weather. We would have to monitor to coal level regularly. That’s just too much babysitting!

A 7 lb prime rib cooked to perfectly medium rare on Christmas Day in 3 hours 40 minutes. It just required planning to get all the different dishes into the oven.

The last time we tried to cook a 9 lb prime rib in the Weber during the winter, it was still below 100 degrees after 6 hours! It should have been done in about 3 hours.

In comparison, a 22 lb turkey cooks in 2.5 hours on the Weber on Thanksgiving. The temperature is warmer on Thanksgiving.

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Ours weren’t rescheduled this year.
I would’ve preferred to know that in advance of the lorry waking me up at 7am this morning (after getting to bed at 2am) and having to run out in the rain in my PJs* to take them my bin :see_no_evil::see_no_evil::rofl::rofl::rofl:
*Grateful for my new semi-decent Christmas PJs.

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Last night, DH suggested that we leave up the trees and decorations for the year! The wreath will need to go because the needles have been shedding. But the trees and garlands are fake and can stay. I dunno…

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Honestly it did bring me joy some days to turn it on even though it was like, June 1st and not remotely near Christmas.

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Christmas in July? I mean, the stores start Christmas around then, right?

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I absolutely did that. Watched all the Hallmark movies, made cookies, etc.

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We celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, so it all stays up until after the 6th.

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I think I’ve told this story before on another thread? We know a family that does that. They realized they pretty much never use their “formal” living room except for the Christmas season, so they decided to just leave it decorated year round. The running joke is if they have company at any time of year, they take pictures with the tree. :joy::joy::joy:

Oh, to bring this “on topic”, here we are passing through their area on the way home from WDW summer 2010!

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That is hilarious! I love Christmas decorations but leaving everything up year round may take away from some of the nostalgic feeling when everything goes up for the season.

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and… what about dusting it??? :grimacing: :christmas_tree: My mom decided to permanently leave her 20 foot tree up in their log cabin… it gets dustier every year… she says it’s snow… yuk! :nauseated_face:

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I was wondering about this (and I don’t even worry much about dusting).

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Oh yeah! Good point! How do you dust a tree filled with ornaments!

I think not!

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DH is not a duster. I went into his room at his parents’ house before we were married. The dust on his dresser and night stand was like a layer of cloth, thicker than a sheet of Bounce! I picked it up and it was intact!!! :pleading_face: He just grinned at me.

This is the same man who vacuums and mops the same area like 4 times before he moves on! So, you can tell how the chores are divided in our house!

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Well, there you go! Just pull off the top layer when it gets to that point? :joy::joy::joy:

But, seriously, if the room is shut off well, there can be surprisingly little dust. We have a storage room in our house that we don’t spend time in. I originally put sheets over things that weren’t in boxes and realized it wasn’t really needed. With no people/animals (there is an AC vent), there just isn’t much dust.

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