Too Much of a Good Thing

I love Christmas, particularly all the shiny shiny pretty lovely baubles that I can decorate with.  The sparklier the better, I say!  Unfortunately, over the years, this adds up to a rather lot of decorative items that only come out once a year.  In terms of what lives out on the porch, this is what it looks like after several years of binge holidaying:

Scary, isn't it?  A lot of this stuff hasn't seen the glittering lights of the winter holiday season in more than a few years.  Why?  Why keep all this stuff?  I'm not entirely sure, aside from I always vaguely think I will use it, or give it away, or perhaps one year or another I will want to be thematic and go all red and green (done that), or I will repurpose things (I had a Christmas chandelier idea once...).  Needless to say, it never happens.  The boxes take over, things get piled up and buried, and I finally hit a point of being ready to rip my own eyeballs out just so I don't have to look at the mess any longer.  After digging through all the boxes I've been keeping around for years, I have exactly one wine box and one small round container of special ornaments and holiday baubles that (a) I want to keep because they are reminders of good times and wonderful people, or (b) I just really like them right now.  There is, surprisingly enough, a high percentage of pink, sparkles, and glitter.  Shocking, right?

Keep in mind, these boxes represent only what was on the porch.  There's a whole lot more in the car hut.

Thank goodness for friends with children who are wanting to decorate with sparkly things this holiday season.

My lovely friend and her two lovely daughters came by this evening for first dibs on the Epic Holiday Purge which is commencing on the farmlette.  They dug, and shifted, and shuffled.  There was quite a bit of squealing glee, and only one minor smashing mishap involving a rather ugly orange (orange?? what was I thinking?) glass ball.  After about 30 minutes of exploring the accumulated holiday debris, the girls hauled away a couple of boxes of ornaments and jingling things, and crammed a tall faux Christmas tree into the passenger seat of the family car.  Don't they look happy?  Everybody loves Free Shopping!!

Happy kids, happy friend, happy happy me.  I can hardly wait to purge the rest of it.