De-Christmasfication

We spent much of the day removing all the traces of holiday from the house. I put NavyGuy in charge of the tree, (which I do every year because I hate taking off all the ornaments), and every year I swear I'll never let him near it again because he inevitably screws something up. (Sorry, hun, I love you... but you do.)

This year he broke an ornament (luckily it was one of his own so we avoided bloodshed), and put all of the ornaments into the new ornament storage boxes that I found at Storables.

Which could be confusing because aside from the clumsiness, it sounds like he did everything correctly. Except many of our ornaments already have their own boxes - you know, those nicely labeled Hallmark boxes - which I keep year after year... can you guess where I'm going?

Yup, those boxes are all sitting empty in a rubbermaid container because I failed to supervise NavyGuy closely enough and did not notice that he hadn't put the ornaments in their Hallmark boxes until after he had emptied the entire tree. Had I been more motivated, I would have taken all the ornaments out and re-done the system; instead, the mistake will be corrected come Christmas 2010.

Sigh.

The outside lights still need to come down, and there's a few miscellaneous items that I missed in the first sweep of the house, but for the most part, Christmas is over. Kind of depressing, what with the house looking all empty and boring again. But, it's a chance to bring back all the fun home accessories that have been stored away!

Who else dreads taking down their holiday decorations? Any secrets to making the process less hell-ish?