boxing up Christmas

Two days ago was New Year's Day; I boxed up Christmas.

We brought down the egg box, left over from moving, six years ago.  Both manger scenes were put away, figure by figure laid back into styrofoam and blown-plastic pockets.  Snow globes nestled into boxes, cushioned with pine garland.  Ornaments were unhung, and packed away between pages of paper toweling.  Christmas books, a collection added to each year, arranged by size and snugged into a corner of the Christmas box.  An ornate glass bottle and brass box - wisemen's gifts - went in the bottom, and the miniature Christmas tree - our first, so many years ago, so far from home - reclined on top.  The stable scene from my childhood, practically unmarred across the decades, fit in across the snow globes.

Sugar dismantled the brass Swedish angel chimes, piece by piece into vinyl sleeves; it was tucked in, too.  The plastic Fontanini, the magnet manger, the foam sticker nativity from someone's Sunday school - all packed away in the Christmas box.

It was heavy when I carried it upstairs, all that Christmas in an egg box, lowered with a careful thud onto the spare room closet floor.

I left out the Christmas cards, though; taped around our livingroom doorframe, we'll have company all winter.  The kitchen beam kept its pine adornment, too, with the big red bow and the red folded-paper garland from some far-away land.

I couldn't pack away the Moravian star made of gold screen, either, so it swings in the window above the kitchen sink, still catching the light.  The pine garland swags and strings of wooden cranberries will stay up on the livingroom windows, for awhile anyway.  January needs color.  In the window by the corn stove, the snowman and wool penguin still huddle together.

And the candles - jar candles and flameless candles and pillar candles and window tapers and tea-lights - they've sort of spread out and taken over.  I think we'll need their light.  January can be dark.

I boxed up Christmas, two days ago, but the remnants remind us that it was, and will come again.