All Boxed Up

I love Christmas. Come November, I start playing Kenny and Dolly's Once Upon a Christmas soundtrack and planning where I'm going to put the decorations. I like seeing the bell ringers at Fred Meyer, the terribly hung lights on the neighbors' houses, those god-awful giant snow globes, the holiday themed car ads - the whole experience.

As a child, I wanted this feeling to continue through February. But now that I'm in my own house, come December 26th, it suddenly overwhelms me. It's like a switch is flipped and Christmas becomes clutter. It threatens to swallow me and I can't stand to look at it. Our tree is already down. The decorations are in Rubbermaids in the garage. Everything Christmas is wiped from the house before the end of the 26th or I start twitching. (It's so bad that I even seriously considered taking the tree down last night.)

I used to think Boxing Day had something to do with fighting, but now I'm convinced it is the international day of putting away decorations. I could google it, but that'd ruin the mystique.