Christmas Week Chores

Among all the merriment and celebrations (and laying on the couch watching movies and naps) I do actually count on getting certain things accomplished during the week between Christmas and New Years. I'm happy to say I'm making pretty good progress on my yearly chores this week. Here's a sampling of the compellingly mundane stuff I do during this brief window of sanity before January hits again:

• File all the kids special momentos collected over the last year in their "memory tubs" in the attic. This year there was some great stuff because of Cam's graduation and Annalisse's Sweet 16. I'm just hoping they'll appreciate it when they buy their first home(s) and I get to give them 5 or 6 large plastic tubs containing their artwork/projects (from daycare on up), report cards, school papers or essays I thought they might find interesting later, magazine and newspapers highlighting significant current events, t-shirts from special events or camps or whatnot, and other random stuff. Thanks, Mom. Now where am I supposed to put all this stuff?
• File all the bills and paperwork from the last year. Keep the important things, bring the rest to work for the locked incinerator bin. Mark could never do this task because he never throws anything away.
• Place my yearly photo order. This year I'm up to 885 pix over the last year. I'm one of those people who fears that in this digital age, we won't have any actual, printed pictures for the future. Think about it: we now take hundreds of pictures with our digital cameras and many people never print them. What if their computer crashes? What if the media changes and at some point they can't access their pictures anymore? Better get those pictures printed!
• Buy photo albums for said pictures and put them in. This takes a while but is a good activity for hanging on the couch while I'm watching a movie. Between naps, that is.
• Catch up on my reading...mostly on my pile of magazines, to make time for reading the new books I got for Christmas (David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk and Miss Peregrine's Home Peculiar Children), as well as my upcoming bookclub book(s) (I'll miss the January meeting so I need to start The Hunger Games for February).
• Clean out old clothes. It's amazing to me that I fill several bags worth of cast-off clothing to donate every year. We have too much stuff.
• Take the Christmas tree down on New Years day. Always a tedious activity and I'll be sad to see it go. It brings such soft, warm light to the cold winter nights. As a consolation prize I'll leave the lights on the mantle until mid-February. That should get me through. 

Then, there is the usual running around of the kids during Christmas week, and this year is no exception. How awesome it is not to be working this week, though. I'm hoping I can return to work on Tuesday refreshed and ready to meet the challenges of a new year.