Is Christmas over yet?

It was so refreshing to NOT see tossed out Christmas trees on the day after Christmas. I wasn’t expecting to see any and I didn’t... but I wondered when they would start appearing curbside... or exactly where I was supposed to put my old Christmas tree.

About a week after Christmas, I expected to start seeing trees, but no, no tossed trees yet. Two weeks passed, still no trees. Ahhh, Epiphany... that’s the day everyone will throw out their tree... 12 days after Christmas! No... well, a few trees here and there, but no real mass tossing of trees. We were ready to dispose of our tree whether or not it was fashionable to do it at that time.

So I de-decorated it, put the bulbs away and then handed the disposal job off to Paul. Problem was, we weren’t sure where you were supposed to put it. Since we had seen a few on the curb, we decided we could put ours there too. But Paul didn’t want to carry it down the steps of the apartment building and make a mess of dropping needles. He wanted to DROP IT OUT THE WINDOW onto the street. So we plotted and planned to find the right window and just the right time to toss our Christmas tree onto the sidewalk below.

I never really liked this idea. If dropping needles was a problem, I would just have to find a way to prevent it. I soon discovered that my sister had used really big trash bags as packing material for our Christmas presents! So I somehow managed to stuff the tree into the bag so that we could drag it down the stairs instead of tossing it out onto someone’s head.

Christmas, I guess, is over.