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Show Cleaning up after Christmas is Worse than Preparing for it PAROWAN - In honor of the New Year I have just completed a project that I plan on entering in the Guiness Book of World Records. I have just completed com-pleted a marathon vacuuming project, pushing an upright vacuum cleaner for the longest time ever in a 17 by 15 foot living room. AND THERE ARE STILL PINE NEEDLES, Clutching their little dried up pointed heads to the bottom of the shag carpet, and some of them are from last year and have held on by lurking near the mopboards and in dark corners. Vacuums just aren't built for the heavy duty work that comes with Christmas. It was all I could do to stand the screeching, clattering and smoking as we ran into nests of broken ornaments and ornament hooks. They just don't build them the way they used to. I would love to find one that would just digest paper clips and pennies without such a fuss. It's almost as hard to get over Christmas as it was to get ready for it. There's the challenge of getting everything put away, finding places to put new crockpots when there wasn't really room for the existing ones. We have finally 6utgrown the race car era at our house. There was a spell of about five years when each Christmas meant a giant race track that wound around our living room and overflowed into the adjoining ad-joining doorway, that we were forced to thread our way through for at least a couple of weeks after Christmas. Now all we have to worry about is being able to hold our ears long enough to work our way through the1 room with the stereo in it. Parents and toddlers are stumbling over giant rocking horses, big wheels, and Tonka Trucks, and dreaming of summer when it can all be moved outside. Each New Year I'm going to try to remember the lessons of the year before. For example, next year I . absolutely resolve to get my Christmas shopping done late, that's right, "Late". Every year the things I buy early go on sale for half price just before Christmas ,and it not only costs me more but the recipients of the gifts think I got them on sale anyway. Every year I promise myself I'll put the lgihts off the tree away in an orderly manner so it won't take us hours of work and some mumbled ' bad words trying to untangle them the next year, but I've just dropped them in a tangled lump in the bottom of the ornament box so I guess I'll start that next year, and also next year V . T H never leave the .dishes unwashed overnight or the beds unmade in the morning and I'll stop eating chocolate cake and peanut cups, and start walking four miles every day, and stop biting my nails, and always remember to buy razor blades and shaving cream, and hold the phone conversations con-versations down to two - " minutes each etc., etc. I would start on all the resolutions this year, but I've got a headache just thinking about it. I hate to rush into things and I need more time to complete this list so I'll wait until 1981 or perhaps even 1982. That has a nice ring to it I'm sure I'll be ready by then. |