Holiday Decor: The Good, The Bad, and the Tardy

I know plenty of people who remove the obvious Halloween decorations on November 1 (you know, the skeletons, fake tombstones, cotton-batting spider webs, jack-o-lanterns). And then they artfully re-arrange the bales of hay, corn stalks, stacks of gourds, potted mums and other Harvest-type paraphernalia to create a new display that lasts through Thanksgiving. Whereupon they trot out the red bows for the front lamp post, the wreath for the door, and twinkle lights for the long line of shrubs that edges the path to their front door. These decorations stay up through the New Year and until some time deemed discretely appropriate in very early January.

It is all very orderly and seasonal and organized and proper and Impeccably Calculated to Make the Neighborhood Association Weep with Joy at the Neighborliness of It All.

And then there's me.

We carve our jack-0-lanterns a day or two before Halloween. We keep them on the front porch for those few allowable buffer days in November when it's not completely ridiculous still to have pumpkins on your doorstep. (They're gourds! Kind of like in a cornucopia! But with scary faces, so that's even better!) Then, on the first day of garbage pick-up after Halloween, we ditch the slowly collapsing faces. There are no Harvest Stalks of Autumnal Goodness to replace them.

About two weeks before Christmas, we trot out the red and white bows, the wreath, the stockings. We buy a real tree and cover it with twinkle lights and keep it lit in the front window in the evenings. We spend more time decorating inside than outside, though we do put something pine-y and bow-y on the black lamp-post at the top of the driveway. And, of course, we put out the luminaries that the Neighborliness Enforcement Association puts in our mailbox with the not-really-kidding note about how "everyone will notice" if your house doesn't participate in the Christmas Eve Luminary Lighting. (We generally have to ask one of our neighbors to light them, though, since we are always at my sister's house 40 miles away when dusk falls on Christmas Eve.)

We get the tree down in the first ten days of January, so as to be sure the yard waste/composting trucks, which make a special winter run to pick up Christmas trees, get ours. However, we may or may not manage to file away all the boxes of ornaments and stockings that same day. (Just getting that dry and prickly thing out to the curb without leaving every single one of its needles in the front hallway -- and then cleaning up all the needles it did leave -- is work enough for one day, if you ask me.) And, we may or may not get our few outdoor decorations down in a timely manner.

In fact, as I write this, we may or may not still have a wreath on our front door.

Hence, I feel a compulsive need to explain that, although my children are still playing with a pair of Christmas ornaments in the first week of February, in my defense, they were attached to very belated holiday present which they only received last week. And because the boxes of ornaments have been in the basement for a while now, the cute little stuffed gingerbread people that "sing" Jingle Bells have become part of the dollhouse family.

So, the fact that my front porch lights are still adorned with giant white bows and my front door still smells faintly of lovely eucalyptus when you open it in no way indicates that I am one of those people who doesn't know when enough is enough already with the holiday decorations. They may, I am quite willing to admit, indicate that I am one of those people who can't get her act together to take down the last three shreds of holiday decor in a timely manner. But, as with the putting up part: we paid more attention to indoors than outdoors, and we just kind of forgot about that wreath and those bows.

At least I don't still have a giant sleigh stacked with presents in my front yard, like one of the houses I pass every day on my way to work. Now that would be embarrassing.

Can anyone tell me: what is the statute of limitations on wreath surrounded by homemade snowflakes and bows? If you live in a climate with snow, can you just call it "Winter" decoration rather than holiday? And if so, does that mean that as long as you put it away sometime in February, you really ought to congratulate yourself for doing your own little part towards the Neighborhood Decorative Beautification Project? Or should you expect another one of those letters from the Association about how you are bringing down the tone of the whole street by not cleaning up after yourself in a timely manner? (Yes, we got one of those notes one fall, when we apparently left our leaves on the front yard, unraked, for too long. We only had one infant and THREE separate rounds of stomach flu that fall, so I can't really explain why we didn't rake faster. Wasn't it Neighborly of the Association to ask after our health!)