I have posted about the Christmas Straggler for over a decade now. It’s generally a single Christmas decoration overlooked when packing up after Christmas which gets overlooked, and it does seem to happen every year. My posts generally occur in January or February. I don’t know how that reflects upon my housekeeping skills in the past, but I’m still mostly doing the housekeeping grind, although the lower level is only getting a full cleaning every two or three weeks–which means that anything I find whilst dusting this year I will report in…. January or February. So whatever the timing of my posts say about our housekeeping, I guess it will say it again.
But, gentle reader, this is the winningest Christmas Straggler ever, so far. Maybe.
We rearrange the living room slightly for Christmas. We turn the sofa so that one edge of it touches the wall and it faces the fireplace and the corner where the tree goes. This is not on the lower level, where we slightly rotate the furniture every decade or so; this is the main level with the record shelves and console stereo. When we first moved in, the sofa was this way all the time, and we had a television in the corner and a toy box behind the sofa (and generally toys all over the floor to better inventory them). When the boys grew older and got access to the lower level, we rotated the sofa so its back was against the wall and the mostly unused 22″ television is off to the side. We only rotate the sofa now for Christmas.
At any rate, I got the trees out this weekend, and moved the end table and little flower arrangement that hides the unused coax port on the wall, and….
That is one of the fake Christmas tree needles which has somehow lurked in the corner of the living room since…. Well, I don’t exactly know when.
Now, when we pack up after the holiday, we vacuum thoroughly where the tree was and where the sofa is going to go against the wall for the next 10.5 months. And we do vacuum the living room regularly–my son does it weekly, and I’ve done it a time or two over the course of the year. I’ve swept and Swiffered the tile in front of the firebox a couple of times over the year. I even cleaned out the firebox once this year (we don’t use that fireplace as its mantel is too close to the firebox and it lacks anything but a portable screen before it).
So where do these needles come from? Are they caught under the baseboards? Up the chimney waiting for a downdraft? In some nook in the sofa until they’re shaken out?
I have no idea, but every once in a while, one of these little plastic needles emerges, whether on the main level or on the lower level where we also have a tree.
Just to mock our housekeeping practices.
Or, I suppose, I could reframe it and think it’s just to give us a little bit of Christmas often in the middle of the year.
But, I suppose that it does our indict our housekeeping in that although I saw that needle on Saturday afternoon, it was just during the composition of the post this morning that I went upstairs to pick it up. Although in my defense, the youngest was supposed to vacuum that room on Sunday but had other pressing matters–playing football with his brother and going to the gym–and I cannot help but note that now that I have assembled the tree, the carpet beneath it has many more fake needles now. Which are undoubtedly crawling to their years-long hiding places even as I am not watching.
