Ho. Ho. Humbug

By Amy Coward

December has arrived and the pressure is on. Nearly everyone I know has decorated their home for the holidays, bought gifts and started baking. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get it in gear?

I’m going home after work tonight with plans to put up a Christmas tree. But the thought of going in my attic to retrieve boxes of decorations is not getting me in the spirit. If only I had my dream house with a storage room where the fully decorated tree could simply be wheeled in and out. Why hasn’t that come to be? My husband and I will have to schlep up and down the rickety attic stairs, unearth large tubs of décor from beneath luggage and boxes, and wrangle them down to sort through them.

It’s not sounding like fun.

Would the smell of baking cookies make me feel better about this while I work? Would familiar holiday songs help? Maybe. I rarely turn down a fresh-baked cookie. And the month of December comes with carte blanche on eating whatever you want, right? And we could certainly crank up the tunes. I may have to try it.

Either way, we will power through the chore of decorating as if we were hosting multiple parties throughout the season (which we are not). We will put up a live tree, string it with lights, pull out familiar family heirloom ornaments and reminisce about years past. Then we will cover every possible table top and bookshelf with Christmas knickknacks. It’s go big or go home, right? I will likely grumble a time or two during the process about the hassle of it all and wonder how many more years I’ll bother.

But when it’s all finished and I dim the lights, I’ll remember why I bother. The house never looks better than when it’s decorated for Christmas. Twinkling lights, little Santas, reindeer and snowmen. Ornaments and decorations the kids loved when they were young. Memories everywhere.

That makes it worth it.

I’ll sit each evening with my holiday ambience going on and be glad that we went to the trouble. At least until it’s time to pack it all up again.

For that, I might need more than a cookie.

Amy Coward is a public relations professional in Columbia, SC. When she is not managing the madness of event planning at Palmetto Health Foundation, she is turning her empty nest upside down looking for fun and finding it.