Christmas

There are all kinds of arguments in churches about when you decorate for Christmas. I don't care all that much. The only reason I decorate at home is so I can dust once a year (and the people I love enjoy decorations). I'm thinking we need summer solstice decorations so I dust twice a year because it was kind of gross this year.

Church people argue hymns and decorations, but in my mind, decorations go up whenever someone gets the gumption to dig them out of the church attic and put them up. Some years we wait until Christmas Eve and other times they go up as soon as the high schoolers want to put them up.

My bigger quandary is Christmas underwear. 

Can you wear Christmas underwear throughout the entire year? I'm asking for a pathetic friend whose mother and aunt still buy her underwear hoping she'll throw some nappy pairs away. They buy ones that are much more creative than Costco bulk packages. 

Okay, it's me.  It's really sweet (and a little weird) that my mom and aunt take pity on me. There are things I don't think about and underwear is definitely on that list.

Until now that I own Christmas underwear. It's almost as exhausting as the days of the week undies I had as a kid or the right and left labeled shoes. It seems overwhelming to match them to reality.

Nobody sees my underwear except for Kirt and the neighbors, so who cares? 

Yet for some reason, I do care.

I suppose I feel like reality is a slippery beast anyway, and if I defy the conventions of time in my most intimate of places then what chance do I have of maintaining any order? I tend to feel like I'm on the cusp of chaos anyway. Christmas underwear in summer might just be the push into disorder that sends all of life spiraling. 

I know life won't unravel because I have snowmen on my aspirations (see dad, I didn't write "ass") while the sun is shining for 18 hours, but I will probably bury them in my drawer and pull out the unraveling pairs to make it through the summer just in case. 

To everything there is a season (cue The Byrds). Nothing lasts forever. Neither the light nor the dark, the snow nor the sun, the sorrow nor the joy will define us through our whole lives. Some things need taken out and some put away for every season. That's good to remember when we feel trapped or complacent in one time or place. Or when the objects surrounding us keep us from moving into the next stage of life.

Everything has its season and then passes into another. Underwear will be buried until Christmas or neglected laundry makes me dig it out again.