Adulting Wins to Be Proud Of: Taking Down the Christmas Tree Within a Reasonable Amount of Time

Even though I don’t really celebrate Christmas, I still wind up with a Christmas tree every year because I throw an Ugly Sweater Christmas Party and it wouldn’t be a Christmas party without some festive decorations.

KHAAAAAAAN!

When I was a girl, my grandparents bought real trees, but my mother and I owned an artificial tree that she kept in the attic along with a box of ornaments. Each year we’d put up the artificial tree, decorate it with our beat-up plastic ornaments, and smother it in tinsel, because my mother was no Frank Costanza. Catholics, you may or may not be aware, celebrate Christmas until 6 January, the Epiphany, the day when the Wise Men are said to have finally reached Bethlehem and recognized that Christ was the Son of God. Each year, on Boxing Day, my mother would say, “We can’t take the tree down until January 6.”

And then it would stay up until March.

Christina Majaski once left her Christmas tree up for at least a year, until she had to put it down because it attacked her dog. It even had its own Twitter account and its own Facebook. I hear tell that Crazy Christmas Tree went so far as to sign up for Plenty of Fish. Ten thousand years from now, scientists of the future are going to dig up our Internetz and who knows what they’ll think.

But I digress. I was talking to a cousin from the other side of the family last night and she was all, "I haven't even taken my Christmas trees" (that's right, more than one!) "down yet," but she was pleased when I explained that you're not supposed to have taken them down yet because Wise Men, Bethlehem, etc. 

"That means I can put it off until next weekend," she said, happily.

And that's adulting done right.