It seems like every holiday I’m always the last-minute-Larry that’s running around seconds before the celebration starts putting up holiday decorations.
There was that one Christmas that my collection of stuffed snowmen sat in a pile in the middle of my living room floor for two weeks — I might have finally gotten all of them into their normal holiday positions just a few days before the New Year. Don’t judge me — I really like stuffed snowmen and snowwomen and I have a ton of them. (I’m not going to even talk about how long it takes me to wrap Christmas presents…but you can totally judge me on that.)
It’s normal for my battery operated window candles to not have batteries in them. Most holidays I’m lucky that the candles made it onto the window sills. That’s something I typically do after guests have arrived. I might even ask you to help me put the batteries in the candles, but I’ll never ask you to help me find my stash of batteries, I’d like you to come back to my house sometime in the future.
If you’re a guest at my house for Thanksgiving, you’re probably used to me decorating the dining room area with colorful turkeys sometime between the appetizers and the main course. I’ve even asked several of my in-laws to place little sticky pads on the bottoms of all the folding chairs that I’ve rented for an event. Sorry to my father-in-law and one of my niece’s — yes, the backing on those little sticky chair “feet” are really difficult to remove, I feel your pain, thank you for taking care of that for me! At least I didn’t ask you to do it during dinner…
Last year at Thanksgiving, I asked my mother-in-law to fill two sets of salt and pepper shakers, one of them didn’t have a stopper and probably hadn’t been cleaned out in 20 years. I’ve also asked her to vacuum my living room carpet. Only once, but I’m surprised that she keeps coming back to my house.
I’ve asked my own mother to help me set a table for 12 guests and polish the silverware, but I inherited my obsessive “need to buy more dishes” gene from her, so biologically she’s required to help me.
So let’s just say that I’m not the most organized in preparing for holiday…
So imagine my surprise that today, I actually dug my fall decorations out of the spare room closet! And I hung the Halloween ones! There’s a skeleton in the window next to the front door, a little spider on a pumpkin, a couple of jack-o’-lanterns in the kitchen. I have a little bird that I bought last year from Target that’s wearing a witch hat, a cape and carrying a broom (see above snowmen).
So I didn’t hang the Halloween wreath on the front door yet, but since my normal Halloween routine consists of hanging that skeleton next to the front door right before I pass out candy to the first trick-or-treater (one year I saw the first group walking down my street as I arrived home from work, I kept all the lights off in my house until I hung that Halloween decoration. It wasn’t my finest moment.), I think I am doing extremely well this year. It’s almost 2 weeks before Halloween!!
Sure there’s a pile of stuffed and ceramic pumpkins sitting on the bed in our spare room (see above snowmen) — but I got most of the Halloween stuff up already. I’ve got days to put out the other items. I even grabbed batteries for those lighted pumpkins, maybe they will be lit before the holiday…
Notes from a Self Quarantine 