De-Decorating ..... UGH !

I love decorating for Christmas. I love everything about it. I have a closet devoted to housing my numerous Christmas decorations that I have deemed too precious to be stored either in the attic or in the basement. It takes me two full days to make the house look like Christmas, one just to rearrange the furniture so that my rooms will accommodate the soon to be displayed Christmas decor, and the other just to bring things our and start decorating. There is a need for 2 trees in this house. Not because the house is huge, but the memory tree is in the front room and a smaller 4 foot tree is in the family room, where we often spend the most time. However, the memory tree is the one that attracts the most attention. Long long ago, when we were first married, we began to buy an ornament every time we went away either for a long weekend, or for a full vacation. We have an expensive porcelain ornament from a trip to North Carolina and an equally lovely one hundred percent plastic Mickey Mouse from the first trip to Disney world. In fact we have 2 Mickey ornaments, and my now adult children are able to distinguish between the 2 of them thus remembering the 2 vacations spent at Disney when they were young. The tree is filled with ornaments made for me, by friends and by children as well as bought ornaments that reflect what we were all about in that moment in time, like a cute penguin holding a gargantuan video camera, all the rage in the 80's. I love pulling out the ornaments, I love reminiscing about all the events in our lives....I hate putting everything away! I hate finding the right Hallmark box for the right ornament. I have been told that my boxes are as important to the collectible ornaments as the ornaments themselves. I personally would prefer to grab them and throw them into a shoe box, and quickly call it a day. I also know that once the decorations are down, there will be tons of cleaning to do as well, because once the decorations went up, I merely dusted and vacuumed around them so as not to disturb the look. I'm thinking that it is a good thing that I took a few days off from work, I'm going to need it!