Decorations...

So it's that time of year again. It's time for the Christmas decorations to come out of the attic and get put up around the house. This brings me great angst. Why, you may ask? I know what you're thinking. It's Christmas time, it's supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. Well, it is for the most part. EXCEPT for the part where i have to hand the lights up. That is what gets me, and it does it every year.
The first big step is to untangle the lights. I have no idea how they get so tangled up in a matter of 11 months. I put them in there ever so carefully, gently in fact. But somehow they come out in knots and wrapped around each other, all just to tick me off. Then, i have to test all the lights out before i hang them up. I never used to test them, until one year i hung up all my lights and half of them didn't work...and it was the MIDDLE half of some of the strands! So now i've learned to test all the lights before they get hung up anywhere. Well, this year, the lights decided to work when i tested them, but then stop working when i went to hang them up! It was really testing my patience. My final gripe about the lights is that i have to go around and clean all my windows 2x before i hang the lights, otherwise the suction cups don't stick and i spend the entire holiday season re-hanging the suction cups and lights in every single window. That one really gets me. Even when i clean the darn windows, sometimes those stupid suction cups don't stick. Instead of looking like nicely decorated windows, they look like giant holiday x's!
And every year i have to make sure the front of my house looks nice, and i usually like to add something to it to make it better than it was the previous year. We've managed to go from just plain lights around the windows and posts, to lights on the fence, to red ribbon on the posts too to make them look like candy canes, to green realistic garland and bows around the window too, to now the "tree-like" garland ALSO around the posts. I haven't hit that "too much" point yet, at least i don't think so.
The final step here at the Stiffie household is to get the Christmas tree. We have to have a real tree every year, per my orders. None of that fake tree stuff here! We make our family pilgramage to the tree farm and we cut down our own tree that we hunt for hours to find. This year, Mady gets to join in the fun of the annual tree cutting. We've agreed to get a "slightly" smaller tree this year, mostly so Mady doesn't feel the need to pull it down. We do tie it to the wall every year, so you think we would feel safer. I guess we'll have to see how that goes when we get to it, but somehow i'm thinking we're gonna end up with a huge tree that gets pulled down at least once. LOL