Toted up
I’m gonna need another tote.
It all starts innocently enough. You hang some cute cutouts at your toddler’s eye level: a friendly ghost, a smiling witch. Then you check out the end of season sales and pick up a few items for next year. It’s like a gift when you open the tote the next year and see what you forgot you’ve already purchased. Then something extraordinary catches your eye and you have the perfect place for it. For me this year it was the black and white decor with the pumpkins that reminded me a little of Jack Skellington from “Nightmare Before Christmas”…my favorite holiday movie, by the way. So now the Halloween decor has spread downstairs to the family room and I’m gonna need another tote to store it in. Which will have to stay in one of the guest bedrooms. Because the closet under the stairs is filled with totes already.
My brother tells me it looks like my house has exploded Christmas and I choose to take that as a compliment.
I just wanted to get some ice skaters to display. I have fond memories of being allowed to set up the skaters when I was little. I’m pretty sure they were candles that were never burned, but the mirror was real, ringed with cotton balls glued on to simulate snow. My brothers and I were allowed to play with these skaters whenever we wanted. I’m certain that was my mother’s way of keeping us from touching her other displays. Especially the little white tree with the fiberglass swirled over each twinkling light. Which she was allergic to, but had to have, anyway.
Little did I realize when I purchased the skaters that I was dipping a toe into the world of holiday villages. I just liked the bright and shiny finish on the figurines and never stopped to see the slippery path I was on. But then a friend gave me a church from the collection, and we found a house we liked. Then the barn and greenhouse and tree farm. And skiiers and hockey players. Airport and train station. Gotta have a hayride. And, look! They make a new Santa every year!
I have collected Santas for over 35 years. I buy them myself and get them as gifts. I have ruthlessly thinned the herd to make room for new, tossing the cheap and ugly, dispairing over the broken and faded. The family room is filled with them and now the display has spilled over into the kitchen.
We like to go out shopping the day after Christmas. Not an early morning thing, but casual, checking out the sales and enjoying a lunch together that is more refreshing than our usual holiday fare. Last year I spotted these cute gingerbread figurines – 75% off! – but couldn’t think where to put them, so I passed them by. Then my daughter and I started to riff on decorating the whole kitchen with gingerbread kids, going so far as to suggest we should put knobs on the cupboards so we could hang homemade gingerbread kids on them. It got more and more ridiculous and we were crying with laughter. A good day.
So….. we were garage sale cruising this summer when I spotted a Santa! holding a cookie sheet filled with gingerbread girls and boys! and a Christmas tree made out of overlapping rows of gingerbread cookies! How cute would that look on the refrigerator!!
The vacuum cleaner doesn’t really need to fit into that under stair closet, does it?
I’m gonna need another tote.
