Life to the Full: Holiday Decorating

Everywhere I look, people are excitedly gearing up to decorate for Christmas. Me? I have out my Thanksgiving decorations. Yes, turkeys and pumpkins and leaf wreaths and cornucopias. They follow my Halloween decorations, which are preceded by my Fourth of July decorations, my Easter decorations, my St. Patrick’s Day decorations, and my Valentine’s Day decorations. And sure, also my large array of Christmas decorations.

Am I kidding? Certainly not. The house undergoes a transformation seven months of the year.

As a child, I remember my mother decorating for all the holidays. We had ceramic glitter-frosted bunny rabbits at Easter and little green leprechauns for St. Patrick ’s Day. I’m sure we had Halloween decorations too, but I really only remember the scary backlit-with-a-flashlight gruesome mask carefully displayed in the closet under the stairs around Christmas time. (That was the closet where the presents were hidden, and I was sent down there to get the wits scared out of me so I would never ever open that closet for any reason ever again. I’m not sure I ever fully recovered from that…)

When I got married, I started accumulating my own collection of decorations from mail-order catalogues and gifts of homemade crafts from my mother. It started out pretty simple; a bowl with hearts on it with only $5.99 shipping (Amazon Prime where were you, my beloved…), a Christmas quilt from my mom, some ceramic Halloween figurines that I painted quite handily using the enclosed directions.

But then the collection grew. I used my weird and archaic love of creating things with yarn and plastic canvas to make Kleenex box covers in every holiday design (not to mention refrigerator magnets and wall hangings as well). My mother began making quilts in other holiday designs besides Christmas. When we moved houses a few years ago, one of the considerations was whether there was adequate storage space for my many boxes of holiday decorations.

Still not kidding.

And now, the holiday decoration frenzy continues to grow. Each child’s room has not only a homemade Christmas quilt (with coordinating pillow cases, window valances and wall hangings) but also a quilt set for Valentine’s Day, Easter, 4^th of July and Halloween. I am working on additional Kleenex box covers for all rooms in all of the holiday designs. (My sister-in-law declares we are the snottiest family she has ever seen. She also thinks it’s odd that we have a trashcan in every room. Well duh…it’s for all of the wadded up tissues after we blow our noses!) Every birthday and Christmas I open more holiday decorations, some bought, many hand-made and painted by my mother. And not dorky crafts. Really cool creations like papier-mâché-coated milk jugs to make Jack-o-lantern faces. Or an orange-painted accordion dryer hose wrapped into a circle to make a pumpkin.

It’s a little strange. It’s a little excessive. And sometimes it’s a stressful pain to get it all out and put it all away month after month. But it’s also something really fun my kids will remember and take with them when they leave my house. Literally. Those mounds of quilts are theirs to keep.

I can just see their college dorm rooms now.