The house where Christmas went to die

So let's be clear on my position on Christmas decorations: There is a time for them. And when that time is over, they need to be gone. Personally, I like to see them gone on about January 1, but I understand that a lot of people follow the 12 days of Christmas thing, so decorations stay up until January 6. I'm OK with that too.

What I'm not OK with is Christmas trees up in March. Or really, in mid-January.

So imagine my surprise when I was walking through my living room last night and realized that this is what my fireplace looks like.

 I'm ashamed.

In my defense, Christmas was sort of a non-event for us this year. With Mr. Much More Patient flying in just for the holidays before jetting off for work again, all of the people coming in and out of the house all day and us just suffering from renovation fatigue. We didn't put up a tree. (That was a first for us. Even the year we flew home from the Caribbean on Christmas Eve, we put up a Charlie Brown tree.) In fact, the only decorations I put up were finished on about December 23.

And of course, there was another murder in our house. I guess it has become a tradition: Some people make ornaments every year, others pose for a holiday card. I kill poinsettias. You might remember last year's victim. This year's was so pathetic that it shed every petal/leaf when I picked it up to bury the body.

Now, if I were an overachiever like the kids over at Young House Love  (seriously, they are awesome, but they put the rest of the world to shame when it comes to almost anything related to house sprucing up, organization and especially list-making), I would have taken the sad Christmas leftovers down and promptly whipped up a beautiful mantlescape worthy of a magazine. But I'm not, so instead I laid down on the couch, cowering under the blanket while I waited for the thermostat that I had just cranked up to heat the place to something beyond frozen tundra. Eh, I'll get to it soon. Honest.