We keep our decorations up until after Three Kings Day, 6 January
I do and always have appreciated people who go out of their way to decorate for the holidays. By the way, that does not mean I like having Christmas items in the stores next to Halloween, but that’s not the point of this post. I’m fine with using Thanksgiving weekend for decorating, although we rarely start before the second week of December. We’re pretty modest in our efforts, especially compared to those who have all sorts of outdoor lights and displays. Back when we had a spare artificial tree, we did put one on the front entrance. When that one finally became rather ragged-looking, we didn’t replace it and Hubby decided he wanted to swap to a live tree in the house. We do also have a cute table top “Cajun Tree” given to us years ago by my sister-in-law. It has miniature alligators, crawfish, and bottles of Tabasco as ornaments and there have been a couple of times it was our main tree if we travel over the holidays.
Having room to store a lot of decorations is one issue. More to the point though is having to rearrange so much stuff to make room is one of the real reasons I limit what we do. The other is I’m fine with taking a few hours to get everything up. Spending at least a day and maybe longer for the elaborate lights, etc.,. isn’t anything we want to deal with. During the many moves we made in the Army, Hubby’s final assignment was in Puerto Rico and that was where we learned about Three King’s Day (Jan 6th). It’s a very big holiday throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America and that became our new point for leaving decorations in place. I do admit if we had the space (as does my sister), I would have multiple small trees so I could do themed decorations for each one. We’ve put together quite the collection of scuba, ocean-themed and tropical ornaments and that’s generally what winds up on the tree.
Hubby was scheduled to teach a scuba course today and his student had to cancel so top of his to-do list is going in search of a tree at one of the places where it is also a fund raiser. Sometimes they sell out early, but that’s where he likes to start.
