because our kids are in and out of each other's places pretty much on a daily basis, andrea and i made a pinky promise that we would take down our trees on the same day. this weekend. typically we would have wanted to wait until twelfth night, but that's on a tuesday and i have a pta meeting that night and that morning i am in the classroom…so….the weekend it would be. tenth night has a ring to it and really, gives budding playwrights out there many new opportunities.

but on 2 january i woke up and after plugging in the kettle, i walked over to the double doors i noticed that the tree was giving off an odor best described as pong.

time for the tree to go. yes, the charlie brown tree that sebastian had touched and stroked gently and called "our cutest tree ever" was on the way out.

last year i made the mistake of undressing and tossing the tree without informing the kids. sebastian in particular was quite sad that he didn't get to say goodbye. so this day, as i began removing ornaments and gathering up baby Jesus, the sheep and the rest of the characters from the nativity set, i told my little flock what i was doing.

"are you taking the ornaments off the tree?" asked sebastian

"yes i am kitten and i am putting them in one of these four boxes." i said, showing him my carefully labelled boxes. (tree #1, tree #2, tree lights, skirt #3 and Christmas #4 – house accessories.)

"you need to say goodbye to the tree now, sebastian" i reminded him before he went out to play, because i wanted to get the tree out of the house and into the service lift and from there into the recycling area before they saw the tree, which was losing needles faster than the men's team did at our NYE game of cranium, but that's another story…isn't it?)

i quickly packed up the tree and soon enough it was just down to putting a few tree baubles away in boxes.

while most ornaments go into a large box, there are a few baubles that are worthy of their own boxes. but those baubles in the boxes are not the glass blown, hand decorated, and silk stranded shanghai tang tree ornaments that once rested in the boxes.

no, today the baubles i take care to protect most are the ones the kids love most. the kids love the master yoda tree ornament. i also put in tissue wrapping and zip lock bags the baubles the kids have made me because they mean the most to me. i don't want anything happening to those Christmas ornaments. they are the ones the kids race to put on the tree, the ornaments they exclaim over, the ones that mean the most to our family, that show who our family is and what we are all about.

and the star. they love the Christmas star.

the kids were all quite subdued when they came upstairs and saw our house restored to its normal state.

"where is our Christmas?" "what happened to our Christmas things?" "what did you do mummy to the house?" was asked very briskly by my three younger kiddies.

"Christmas is over my lovelies. Jesus has been born, and we can celebrate that all year long. And the Christmas things are all packed TIDILY (emphasis incase they were going to poke around) in the boxes."

finally sebastian broke in, asking hopefully,  … "even our tree?"

and it was a great Christmas.