The DAN ZONE

Gone are the days when stay-at-home moms could have everything decorated, wrapped, and under the tree in time for Christmas. The festivities of the season and the month of December have become more of a daunting task for most of us rather than something to enjoy, considering most of us work at LEAST the new 9 to 5 (that would be 9 to 6), if not more. How I miss the momentum of the weeks before the holiday: leisurely stringing popcorn while eating every other kernel instead of stringing it; carefully wrapping and decorating gifts rather than throwing them in a ‘gift bag’ (or a gift card envelope for that matter); relaxing with a cup of hot cocoa while listening to Christmas music at home instead of punching the presets during your car ride to work trying to get away from the 12 stations that now play ALL Christmas ALL month; baking cookies and cakes instead of relying solely on the bakery and Entenmann’s.

Well, this year, I finally came up with a plan to make the usually chaotic task of decorating the house a breeze next year. Instead of bringing 20 boxes down from the attic and randomly tossing decorations in the places we THINK they were last year (sort of like the Grinch returning all the stolen items to the Who’s down in Whoville after his heart grew three times that day) we’re going to be able to almost exactly replicate this year’s décor.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this one, but it only took  40 years for this particular Christmas light bulb to go off in my head. Instead of just boxing items away in any old box as we took the decorations down, we instead put all items from a single room all in the same box and labeled it as such. So for instance, we have one ‘kitchen’ box, one ‘library’ box, one ‘dining room’ box. This way, next year, I open up the ‘living room’ box and find all the items that are meant for the living room. It’s going to take NO time to decorate this way. Sure, changing it up might be part of the charm of Christmas, but nothing is written in stone (just black Sharpie), so if we want to take something from, say, the ‘master bedroom’ box and use it in the bathroom, that’s fine. Just as long as we understand that now that item will be packed away in the ‘bathroom’ box!

Oh, how excited I am for Christmas 2010. If my plan works and saves as much time as I think, there WILL be popcorn strung on my tree come December!