Gearing Up For Christmas

Despite the fact that I've inhabited each of my homes an average of only 3 1/2 years, I go into every move swearing that it will be the last one, and I take at least a year or two to arrange and decorate everything exactly the way I want it.  In fact, we were still making changes to our last house after 6 six years of living in it.

This time, though, I'm working a lot faster because I'm on a deadline.  This year I am the host for Christmas dinner for our Phoenix-area family members, and I want everything done before the horde descends.  Unfortunately, that will entail more effort than I had originally expected.

One of the reasons I made the large bedroom in this house into the office and used the dining room table as my desk was so that when I host a dinner party I can shuffle the computer equipment into the closet, center the table in the room, bring out my Grandmother's oak chairs, and voila!  Instant formal dining room!  I can easily seat 10 in this space - 12 if I place the table on the diagonal - and hosting our family generally means feeding 9 or 10 of us.  Piece of cake.

The flaw in this plan: This year my cousin Stan's two children and their spouses will be joining us, making the total number of revelers 13.  I cannot squeeze 13 people into my faux dining room.  I suppose I could put four of us in the kitchen, but that defeats the goal of everyone eating together.  On to Plan B.

This house originally had a double carport rather than an enclosed garage.  The previous owners converted the carport to a garage about a year ago.  It has sheetrocked and textured walls painted a bright white and it has ample lighting.  With the addition of a small electric space heater and a decorated tree, it should be an acceptable temporary dining room on Christmas Day - a little like eating in  a church basement.

Of course, I've been using the garage as the staging space for my unpacking, so the half not occupied by my car is full of empty cardboard boxes, plastic tubs full of old records, and miscellaneous items I haven't found a home for.  In order to use the garage as the dining room for Christmas, I need to clear most of that stuff out of there and paint the ugly grease-stained light green floor some more attractive (and garage-appropriate) color.  I can actually throw a sheet of plywood and a long tablecloth over the plastic tubs and use them as a serving table, but everything else has to go.  Suddenly the two months until Christmas look pretty darn short.

Excuse me, please; I need to go to the U-Haul box exchange website and offer my leftover packing materials to the world.