January.  Ugh.  I can’t say a lot nice about January.  I try.  I do.  It’s just… the house feels naked, well, if you can ever motivate yourself to clean up all the decorations.  And the clutter.  And everything needs to be cleaned because it’s either been underneath the decorations or just plain ignored for the entire month of December (latter for me).  And it’s dark and cold…SO cold this year.  Mercy!  And everybody is broke (guilty!).  And comfort food is all I want for every meal.  And the kids go outside for 5 minutes and their little noses are red and they won’t wear coats because I hate coats and have passed along this avoidance of the stupid things to them so it’s hard to argue.  And…you know… it’s just…January.  Blechk.

I’m not even kidding when I tell you that I usually get to the 2nd of January and start counting down to February.  And let’s face it, February is just January’s gooberish cousin who is a little better than January but still manages to annoy the crap out of grandpa at the family reunion.  Alas, I count down.

Strangely, I haven’t started the countdown this year.  And ya’ll, it’s the 6th.  So, the winds of change, they might be a blowin’.  What I HAVE been doing is reading and listening to funny podcasts and signing up to go places and do fun things with other people and looking at travel opportunities and cleaning up this nuthouse and digging out of the chaos at work and letting the kids have an absurd amount of downtime and I’m just doing all the things anti-January.  And it feels weird.  But 6 days in and January of 2017 doesn’t suck.

On my Facebook page on New Year’s Day, I posted that The Woman Who Thinks That Every Surface, Closet and Crevice in This House Must Be Cleaned Out in the Next 58 Hours and her co-dependent friend, Must Lose 30 Lbs in the Same 58 Hours had shown up.  These gals were exhausting me.  EXHAUSTING. ME.  I ‘bout twirled my hair slam off my head.  So, I did what any rational woman would do and went out for pancakes, cleaned out the guest room closet and called it a damn day.    I had to negotiate with the cleaning one.  (I’ll deal with the eating one soon enough.)  And here’s what we came up with… all the surfaces, closets and crevices must be gone through.  Now.  She wins because we haven’t done anything regarding these areas in quite some time and because my daughter’s musical is in 4 weeks and we have family coming into town and staying in all the beds in all the rooms and they can’t have to step around the piles we have ignored for months and months and years.  Nothing like having company to motivate you to clean your shit up!

Being planners, TWWTTESCACITHMBCOITN58H and I came up with a roadmap because where does one start when the front door trim needs painting, the basement bathroom has been taped for painting since May (I wish I were exaggerating) and the guest bedroom closet won’t close and it feels like everywhere in between is in similar shape?  We do what my Daddy does:  we make a list.

Three pages later…

Closets first.  Must have a place to rake all the stuff that we don’t haul off.  Seriously, how do you get THREE BOXES of crap out of a closet that you rarely open?  Doesn’t matter.  I did.  Moving on.  Tomorrow though.  Seriously.  I’m giving myself a month to motivate my fam (and myself) into getting this place in some kind of order.  I’ll take ANY kind of order at this point.   Eating this elephant one bite at a time.

Next day: my nightstand and corner beside my bed where half read books and leftover cups of water go to die.  The Next Day:  totes in the other corner of the bedroom (moved half to the guest room closet but who cares??).  Lost my momentum for a day or two and then I saw a window:  it’s almost 10 pm on a Friday night (don’t hate me for my glam life) and I think to myself, “I can knock out the bathroom cabinets in 30-45 minutes.  I’m going to sit in the bed and watch Modern Family and work Sudoku puzzles anyway.  What’s 45 minutes?”  I’ll tell you what 45 minutes is:  it’s over 2 hours and 4 bags of trash and trashing medicine from 2011. That’s what it is.   And it’s mag-freaking-nificent!

I feel like I need some kind of transition here but it’s almost 2 am and there’s no good place for this but I need to give The Hubs credit for installing the new mailbox since the door has been jacked up on ours for the last 2 years and the redneck engineering solution finally failed and we broke down and bought a new one.  It was 34 degrees and he installed that puppy.  Mark it off the list!

Next up:  the dining room table.  Unfortunately for us, the Christmas closet (half of a closet in the basement) needs to be cleaned out first.  See, I’m not a decorations person.  It’s taken me 20 years to figure this out and turning 40 to be ok with it.  I’m a Christmas card person, I love to buy fun gifts (gave my sister a solid white T-rex cookie jar this year and damn if she didn’t put that baby out on her counter), I’m a wrapping paper snob and I love me a Christmas Eve service.  Every year I get that sinking feeling that everyone is so caught up in the materialism of the season and that I’m no different and then… on December 24, sitting in the balcony of our big ole Methodist church in the ‘burbs, the music starts and my eyes well up and our kids raise their candles during Silent Night and I watch the sanctuary fill with candle light and I can’t even write about it without tearing up.  It’s the most beautiful moment of the year. For a moment, everything is right with the world and I cannot be one ounce more thankful or more overwhelmed with emotion of the gift that was given to us on that wondrous night.

But decorating every surface of my house?  No, thank you.  No. Thank. You.  We will put up a tree (that I will dread taking down everyday until The Hubs initiates said breakdown),  I will pull out the kids homemade nativities (one my greatest tangible treasures), I will hang the worse for the wear mistletoe in the kitchen doorway (because my MaMa Opal always did), slap the Pottery Barn Outlet placemats on the breakfast table and I will grab a Santa and throw it on the counter and after that, I will tape and pin and clip every Christmas card that hits our mailbox to a surface and the living areas will become more and more festive as cards come in, but that is all.  The outside is a crap shoot.  If Papa Jack comes to visit, he and the boys will do something super tacky in the front yard (We have Puff the Magic Christmas Dragon this year, complete with flapping wings).  Some years there will be a dragon and mismatched lights and sometimes they say ‘to hell with it!’  Not my circus.  I’m more concerned with when I’m going to get out in the cold and pull up the dead flowers.  Not today, friends.  Not in this cold.  Nope.  Nope.  Nope.

A few weeks ago I told my sister that while Christmas place settings and decorated dining room tables are gorgeous and I fully support people who decorate as such, where in the world do they wrap their presents???   Our dining room table looks like the elves have busted in and taken over for the whole month.  And I can’t close doors and hide that shit.  If you come to my house in December, step in, look right and you’ll see all the bags and bows and paper and half the presents waiting to be wrapped.  The problem with this is that once the bows and paper and bags are unwrapped and folded to be put away they all end up BACK on the dining room table.  THEN, the few decorations that have been pulled out are slowly taken down and they are relocated to the dining room table waiting to be boxed up and taken back to… the basement closet.

There’s just one problem.    I TRIED for many years to be a decorating person.  I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.  And I was supposed to like it.  And I was supposed to do it for my kids.  So, that dreaded closet is chock full of All the Shit That is Never Pulled Out and Displayed for Holiday Decorations…twenty years worth.  But, January of 2017 hasn’t sucked the life out of me yet.  And I’m very much okay with the fact that I do not find joy in draggin’ all that crap out any more so, this is the year that I will tackle it.  And if you’re looking for a missing Belkie bear from 1987 to complete your collection, keep an eye on my Facebook page.  I will hook you up!