Well, that, as they say, is that. You know the holiday season is over when the last of the turkey soup has been consumed, as it was tonight. As is our custom, we’ll leave the Christmas tree and the window lights on tonight for one last grand display, then tomorrow everything starts coming down. It was a good Christmas and New Year for us, lots of quiet and downtime, now it’s time to get the house put back in order and the placed cleaned in earnest for 2011.

It’s always bittersweet taking down the Christmas decorations. In many ways you’re glad to be able to get the living room and windows back to their normal state. On the other hand, taking the tree down, you can’t help but wonder what life and the world will be like later in the year when Thanksgiving rolls around and its time to start thinking about putting everything back up again. But that’s the nature of traditions, I guess…

One of the nice customs at the Byzantine Catholic church down the street is that for the Sunday after Epiphany the congregation is invited to bring their containers and dip them in the baptismal font filled with holy water so they can bring some home, then, guided by a leaflet containing a short ritual, go through the house and bless every room. Luckily, I still have some left over from last year, so once the house has been cleaned I’ll be doing the same thing. Given the amount of rabbits around here, I hope it doesn’t take until 2012 before I get finished with the cleaning!

It happens every year, like clockwork: December comes and the third or fourth week you get the first freeze of the winter, followed by another one 2-3 weeks later, and then that’s pretty much it for the cold weather. That’s exactly what we had this year; looking at the latest extended forecast, it would appear we’ve had our freezes for the winter. The bougainvillea and lantana take a licking, but they always come back ticking as good as new after Carmelo trims away all the dead parts.

Once the Christmas stuff is taken down and put away, the time will have come: we’ve given Butterscotch plenty of time to get acclimated to the house, its surroundings and its humans, next Monday we’ll start “bunny speed dating” with Geronimo. I think they’re ready: the first two weeks Geronimo would hiss, growl and try to charge at Butterscotch; now they can pretty much hang out together, only a fence between them, with just an occasional grunt from Geronimo – he’s made such progress the past two weeks! Butterscotch loves to get behind Geronimo’s cage area and hop into the bookcase for something to chew – presently, she appears to fancy Tracey’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy:

She blends in pretty well there, doesn’t she?

Let’s roll out of the holiday season with the Beach Boys doin’ what they do best: acapella.