De trimming

We took the tree down this afternoon.  This was scheduled for last weekend before I found an OLPC XO  on my door step. 

I take off the ornaments and box them.  I am very fussy about it, because I have some highly breakable ornaments and I want to make sure that I wrap them securely.  I do the fragile ones first, so if I get tired by the end of the process it won’t matter if I am just tempted to throw the sturdy ones into the box.  We have ten document boxes full of decorations. I like the document box because they stack easily and are reasonably sturdy.  The most fragile ornaments are in boxes within the boxes. 

As an experiment, we put the tree in the sitting room this year because I knew we would be having a big sit down dinner on Christmas Eve.  However, we decided that we will probably not use the sitting room again.  Usually, when we put the tree in the dining room (originally the living room of our house until we repurposed it) we can see the tree from several rooms.  In the sitting room, we could only see it when we were going in and out of the mud room, and I missed being able to see it as we moved around the house. (Our sitting room is like the traditional parlor in that we don’t use it unless we have company.)