Taylor Swift opens her song ‘Lover’ with the lyrics, “We could leave the Christmas lights up ’til January/And this is our place, we make the rules”. A bit puzzling a phrase, as for me, there is never any question of taking Christmas lights down in any other month. To be fair, she later clarified in an interview with the New York Times that that was its purpose – “I had toyed with the idea of ‘We could leave the Christmas lights up ‘til April’, [..] It’s not about that being a crazy thing. It’s about how mundane it is. It’s about like ‘We could put a rug over there’”. But the question it raised for me, and the question that comes to me every holiday season remains – at what point ought I take down the Christmas decorations?
I have never had a fixed date, a number circled in my calendar to take them down. Superstition dictates taking your tree down before the 5th of January is bad luck (the Twelfth Night), but if you miss that date, you should also keep them up all year. While I often miss that deadline, all year pushes the boundaries even for me. Although, I do think removing the decorations is largely motivation based, in which case, leaving them up for a year is not so out of the question, especially when the whole point is the holiday.
This year, my family removed Christmas decorations in increments. Or, rather, my mother started when I was out the house so I could not make a face about it and we continued in that vein. I’m not sure I would always do it that way, as simply getting it over with does have its advantages. Blast some music through the house, begin your separate little clean-up quests, bring to the attic and relax after a job well done. But I did enjoy the casual effort and the slow transformation this method involved. Collect the baubles from the kitchen table when you have a chance, bring a box up when you’re headed that way. Until at last, we were left only with the Christmas Tree, and the glow its lights bring to our evening. That, and the joy my cat gets from crawling through its branches. Regardless of these two methods, my ‘deadline’ has always been casually approached. These past few years, as a university student, my internal deadline for the return to normalcy has been dependent on whenever my term begins again.
This casual approach is also because my family home uses a fake tree that we can decide to set up and take down at any moment. Recently, my sister has been purchasing a real tree for her house. The tree tends to be a holiday decoration spotlight, and wouldn’t be my first instinct as a starting place for decoration removal rather than bits and pieces around – wreath on the door, figurine in the kitchen, lights in the entryway… But there is only one convenient date when the truck passes to collect the holiday trees, and so her schedule is decided for her, with all the decorations alongside it.
Ultimately, there is no one correct date or time. It depends on a multitude of factors – when are you home? Are you having anyone help you? Does your culture make any demands on the subject? Are you using a real tree? Can you handle the clutter? Can you bear to say goodbye to the season? How quick do you recover from Christmas, or more likely, New Years? As Taylor said, it’s your place – you make the rules.