The Christmas Prep Begins

Today will be the start of what I think of annually as my rushed and crazy slide toward Christmas.

Today's efforts will focus on getting our sunroom ready for the ginormous tree, in all of its glorious awesomeness.

Sadly, this requires furniture re-shuffling and a large amount of patience as I sort through a mound of accumulated, random crapola that has crept into the various corners and storage bins in and around the sunroom.  Sometimes mind-boggling, always frustrating and exhausting, but in the end it is immensely satisfying to have a far cleaner room and less clutter around the edges and squirreled away in and on various nooks, crannies and shelves.

It is amazing how much truly random junk can accumulate among three people over the course of a year, but here we are.

The good news is that I try to use this point in the year for just this sort of purpose:  sorting out the unwanted, unused and randomly, haphazardly piled to make space for something more beautiful for the whole family.  If it results in donations of no longer wanted toys to local charities, then so much the better.

A sort of zen of Christmas moment, if you will, writ large by a cleaning frenzy on the front end.

The irony of this cleaning out of the dross occurring simultaneously with this season of excess and frenzied shopping for the new, the fresh, the next year's clutter?  It is not lost on me, believe me.  This year, I have vowed to do better on my end in terms of not over-buying.  I'm trying to select precise presents that go toward a real need or love of something, rather than simply buying a present at random to have a gift to hand over that someone else won't know what to do with either.   

(We get a lot of random from family and friends who simply will not listen to me when I say we do not need anything and that we'd rather just go out for a nice dinner instead of doing presents.  SIGH  If anyone knows how to make that stop without causing hurty feelings, I'd love advice.)

For today, though, I'll settle for a newly organized and cleaned sunroom and adjacent craft closets and a desk that has clear surfaces ready to be used.  It may actually take a couple of days to do the job correctly, but it will be well worth the effort in the end.

If only I could figure out a way to do this more regularly, it wouldn't have to be a frenzy every year, right?  Alas, thus far no success on that front.  But hope does spring eternal...

(Photo of our own Christmas tree ornament by Christy Hardin Smith.)