What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Sunday was the big de-christmasification day. The process started during the week with me moving all the non-tree decor into the dining room, and bringing the storage boxes up from the basement. Then Sunday, following a morning snowshoe hike in the nearby nature preserve with my son, the process began in earnest.

One by one, the ornaments and lights were stripped from the big tree, packed away and the boxes removed to the basement. The tree was taken outside to the garbage heap, and mounds of pine needles swept from the floors and vacuumed out of the carpets.

The nutcrackers were similarly coddled, boxed and re-stored as were the ornaments on the two, smaller feather trees I put up in the dining and living rooms. The artificial garlands came down from the windows and stair-ways, and the Christmas "village" from my mother's childhood put once again in safe storage with all the pleasant memories from my child-hood as well.

By the end of the afternoon the house was more or less in its pre-Christmas state. It was all very cleansing.

In the same way that I purge my house every year of its Holiday bloat, post-Christmas is a time to also cleanse my body of its seasonal indulges.

I dared to step on the scale this weekend, and I weighed in at 131 pounds. I had been at 128 pounds just prior to Thanksgiving. I had actually gotten down to 124 over the summer, but my body quickly bounced back to the 128 pounds it seems to like to be at these days. So my overall weight gain for the Thanksgiving through New Year's festivities was 3 pounds. Not bad, but not great either.

So the short term goal is to reform the diet to lose those 3 pounds. After that we'll see if I can get back down to 124 and make it stick.