The yearly ritual of decorating for Christmas is an interesting phenomenon at my house. We dread getting everything out of storage and hauling it all upstairs. It tests our patience to put on the lights, try and find the right combination of decorations for the available nails already in the wall, and then find a place to put our regular decor while the Christmas stuff is out.

We enjoy the decorations if they stay put and the lights stay on. But after Christmas we can hardly wait to take it all down and resume the normal boring life. Why do we bother?