All is not calm with Christmas clutter

Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at my house.

And it’s about to drive me crazy.

I’m just a tad obsessive-compulsive about my house, although no one would believe it by looking at my desk at work (covered now with three Tervis tumblers, a water bottle, Yeti, an apple and miscellaneous notebooks and paper.)

My nerves start getting on edge every year when my husband brings all the boxes of Christmas decorations down from the attic. Our house is not huge, so it starts looking cluttery, and I get grumpy. Then there are the little tree needles everywhere, even though it’s an artificial tree.

To set up the tree, our living room has to be rearranged, which means a chair has to be moved to our bedroom.

My stress has gotten so bad that my husband waits to put up our tree until I’m at work, and by the time I get home, he has the tree and our entire house decorated and all the boxes put back in the attic. (No, you can’t have him.)

This year, it worked out that I was home when it came time to decorate the tree, and our younger son was home from Kentucky, where he moved in May.

That made me a little happier, even though he had no interest in participating in the decorating. He did show a hint of interest in the Star Wars and Power Rangers ornaments we’ve had for years and agreed to take home a little tabletop tree for his apartment. This year, our decorations include a little red tree that I bought at an after-Christmas sale. I hung my four or five Arkansas State University Red Wolves ornaments on the tree.

A problem this year with the big pre-lit tree is a chunk of the lights quit working, which is extremely upsetting to my husband. Why do men take nonworking Christmas lights as a personal failure? He will fix them, he vowed.

In addition to making room for decorations, Christmas means buying presents and finding a place to put them. I always start out with a few neatly stored in my closet; then it gets out of control — because my shopping is out of control, my husband would say.

It doesn’t help that two people in our family were born Dec. 16, so part of the piles include birthday presents, which require different paper and a lot of list-keeping to keep the gifts straight.

I started using our married son’s old bedroom to stack presents until we (mainly my husband) can get them wrapped. My husband likes to set up a card table in the living room and watch TV, i.e., football, as he wraps. That means a box of tags, tape and scissors, rolls of wrapping paper and the inevitable scraps on the floor.

Tonight when I got home from work, my husband had the gas logs burning and the Christmas music playing. We sat on the couch after supper, and I looked at the sparkle and shine of the decorations, the pile of wrapped presents under the lighted tree (except for that black hole of darkness) and had to admit, it looked pretty good.

But I’m glad it comes only once a year.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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