Decorations

It started with Christmas decorations.  My living room was gloriously transformed each year with visual reminders of the upcoming holiday. I bought so many decorations there just wasn’t a place to put them all.  I stopped short of buying Christmas themed toilet paper, but the desire to decorate for the holidays grew.

When Christmas was over, fortunately, Valentine’s Day was just around the corner, and Easter soon followed that.  Why not decorate for 4^th of July?  The wait was too long for Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations to go up so I came up with a plan. I’d find a theme for all the months that didn’t have a holiday, and redecorate on the first of every month.

This was all before I became a mother, of course, so I had time for such things.  Changing the monthly decorations around was about the only thrill I had to shake things up in my little world.

Since January was the beginning of a new year, and our place looked horribly bare after removing Christmas decorations, I redecorated the space with a sun, moon and stars theme.  I bought lights and decorations to hang in the ficus tree, I set out placemats and towels with that design.  I went overboard, by anyone’s standards, on finding little things to set around the house with my “theme of the month.”

March came with four leaf clovers and leprechauns to celebrate the wee bit o’ Irish in me and in May our home was full of Norwegian flags to celebrate Norway’s national day commemorating their freedom from the Swedes.  In June I filled our house with every sunflower decoration I could find, since it was the month of my favorite grandma’s birth and she loved to garden.

August was a bit of a challenge to decide upon a theme, but watermelons felt like they accurately portrayed the warm summer days we had - or hoped for.  September brought out the apples and schoolhouse decorations just to remind me how thankful I was to NOT be going back to school.

After our son was born, I continued to put out a few decorations every month, but found I had less time for such trivial pursuits.  Somewhere between diaper changes and dealing with teenage hormones, the plug got pulled on my energy pool and the boxes of decorations just sit, undisturbed in the closet.  Or should I say, closets. 

It’s now halfway through October and I still don’t even have a pumpkin sitting on my porch.  The only theme we’re going with these days is the “homeschooling” one where loose papers cover every tabletop, pencils are scattered on the floor, and notebooks are stacked in every corner. The only “decorations” our living room has seen lately are the forever changing piles of library books and miscellaneous electronic paraphernalia that get left behind by a boy who is growing up all too quickly.  I’m happy to stick with this theme as long as I can.