The Post-Christmas Let-Down

Okay, so the Christmas tree is finally taken down.

I put this task off every year because I hate it. Also everyone else hates it, and no one wants to help.

Here’s a photo of putting the tree up.

See how everyone is happy and full of family togetherness? There’s Christmas music playing, and we’re all holding up old ornaments and cheerfully saying, “Oh I remember this!”

Taking the tree down is a whole other story.

At dinner I said cheerfully, “Who wants to help Mommy take the tree down tonight?”

There was a little silence, and suddenly everyone remembered urgent errands that needed to be performed after dinner.

This year we had the added fun of calculating just how many of those nostalgic old ornaments had been broken by the twins.

Here’s a little sampling of the casualties. The ornaments that go in these boxes, including one that we’ve had since 1995, were smashed beyond repair. (A less happy reason to say, “Oh, I remember this!”)

This is of course not including all the ornaments I glued back together, with varying degrees of success, and put away.

I don’t know how one pair of three-year-olds manage to break so much more in one year than the three kids before them combined over fourteen years.

My husband says the twins’ destructive potential is not just double the average toddler’s, but quadruple.

Here’s the math:
  Stuff Baby Boy breaks alone
+Stuff Baby Girl breaks alone
+Stuff they break together for fun
+Stuff they break accidentally while fighting
=Four times the stuff broken!

There. (You see kids? Math can still be useful!)

Anyways, the tree is put away for another year.

Now we’re left with the sad empty boringness of the room. It’s strange, because this is the very same room that looked perfectly fine a month ago before we put the tree up, and in fact we wondered where the tree was going to go, since the room was so full. But now it looks empty.

It’s like that weird old story about the guy who visited the wise man because his house was too crowded and the man said okay bring in your cow your goat your chickens etc, and then after he finally took them all out again the man felt his house was sized just right.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about I found the book at http://us.macmillan.com)



So I should remember the lesson of this book: It could always be worse.

The twins could be triplets!