Closet Treasures

One of the things we loved about this house was the walk-in closet on the ground level. It's not a huge closet by any means, maybe 4x5 feet, but it was certainly larger than the little coat closet where we had kept all our decorations crammed for ten years: mostly Christmas, but also for other holidays and seasons. When the seasons turned it was like a clown car with storages boxes coming out, being rearranged, and going back in; the only time it was half empty was during Christmas.

Today we visited Hobby Lobby. They had all their ceramic and resin figures and statues on sale. I'm not much of a Hallowe'en person still, but I had fallen in love with a jack o'lantern they had there: James actually thinks it's glass, with an opaque but iridescent type paint on it: the orange skin and a green stem, with the black eyes done in some sort of matte texture. Not sure of how it looks under incandescent light, but in fluorescent light it simply glows without having a light in it. It was counted in the half-price items, so I bought it. I also got the cutest fabric reindeer with my 40 percent off coupon. Both needed to be stored away.

It's occurred to me for several weeks, since bringing home various Hallmark ornaments and fall things, that I needed to clean out the "Christmas closet" and find the rest of my fall things, as we had bought some autumn decorations last August at A.C. Moore in Warwick, RI, and a few things at JoAnn and Michael's. So while James was at his club meeting, I dove into the closet. I'm still not finished and my feet hurt, but all the patriotic things are now in a container, all the summer flowers in another, the spring and Easter things in what used to be the Thanksgiving container, and the Thanksgiving and Halloween things in their own box which had been a hotchpotch of things. The big steamer trunk that was my grandparents' has been shifted again. I have an idea to do what my dad used to do and store the Christmas tree with the lights on it (thereby relieving myself of that dreaded job) under plastic, and I needed the corner where the trunk was for it to stand upright. It's clear but I haven't moved the tree yet since I want to vacuum there.

In the process of cleaning out things I tossed away some old decorations that were too dusty to donate and found some things that didn't need to be packed away: a couple of gifts, the apple crock that James bought me last year at the Christmas Extravaganza at the Cobb County Civic center (it's for dips; you put ice in the bottom part and then put the matching ceramic bowl inside the crock and it keeps the dip cold so you don't have to worry about the sour cream base spoiling), the Christmas linens (which I will put in our closet with the other rarely used kitchen things like the turkey roaster), the autumn tealight holders and the battery powered tealights that go with them, and the autumn wreath for the front door.

I still need a container for the winter/Valentine's Day decorations but everything's a little neater (or will be once I vacuum and put it all away).

For now I'm going out to supper...