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There is a shoebox in my attic held together with packing tape that is older than the tape itself looks like it should be. Inside are six glass ornaments that belonged to my grandmother, each one wrapped in a strip of newspaper from whatever year I last rewrapped them, so if you dug through the box you would find headlines from at least four different decades layered on top of each other.
Taking the tree down is not a single afternoon in my house. It is closer to a week, spread out in pieces around whatever else is going on, and I have come to think that the slowness is the point rather than a failure to get it done faster.
Why I do not rush it
For years I tried to take the whole tree down in one sitting, the way I imagined other people did, tree bare and boxed up by lunchtime. I always ended up frustrated, ornaments piled loosely in a bin with no thought to which one was fragile and which one could take a knock, and by the following December I would find at least two broken.
Now I do it in stages. The first evening, I take off only the ornaments the grandchildren made, the ones with dried macaroni glued to red construction paper, the clay handprint from my daughter that is now old enough to have a daughter of her own. Those go into a bin without much ceremony, because there will be more of them next year.
The glass ones get their own night
A day or two later, once the house has settled back into its ordinary rhythm, I set aside an evening just for my grandmother’s ornaments and my mother’s ornaments, the ones with real weight to them, glass that has survived longer than most of the people who once hung it on a tree. I do this alone, usually with the radio on low, and I take my time finding the right strip of paper to wrap each one in.
I have thought about buying proper ornament storage boxes with individual foam slots, the kind sold for exactly this purpose. I never have. There is something about the newspaper wrapping that feels closer to how my grandmother would have done it, even though I never actually watched her pack away a tree. It is a guess dressed up as a tradition, and I have decided that is allowed.
An ornament that survives forty years was not protected by foam. It was protected by someone taking their time.
The lights come down last
The string lights are the last thing off the tree, and they are the part of the whole process I like least. They tangle no matter how carefully I wind them, and every year I tell myself I will buy a proper reel to wrap them around, and every year I forget until the following December when I am standing over the same knot.
Once the tree itself is bare, my husband carries it out to the curb, needles scattering across the porch floor the whole way, and I sweep them up over the following days rather than all at once, because they keep finding their way out from under the rug for weeks no matter how thoroughly I vacuum.
What the living room looks like without it
The first night the tree is gone, the living room always looks strange to me, too large and too empty in the corner where it stood for six weeks. I usually move a chair or a small table into that spot within a day or two, partly to fill the gap and partly because I do not like walking past an empty corner and remembering what used to be there.
The mantel stockings and greenery come down around the same time, though I leave a single strand of white lights along the mantel through the end of January. That is not tradition so much as stubbornness. The dark months feel long enough without giving up every bit of light in the house the moment the calendar turns.
The boxes go back to the attic
By the second week of January, the boxes are stacked back in their spot in the attic, the shoebox with my grandmother’s ornaments tucked in the same corner it occupies every year, taped shut with whatever roll of tape I could find, which is rarely the same roll from year to year even if the box itself never changes.
I always feel a small relief when the last box goes up the attic ladder, and a smaller sadness right behind it. The house looks tidier without the tree. It also looks less like anything happened there at all, and for a week or two every January, before the ordinary rhythm of the house fully reasserts itself, that quiet feels like its own kind of holiday, the last one of the season.
