My house is a mess. It's tough to keep it clean around the holidays. Present wrapping creates scrap paper and ribbon, and there are always "spare parts" left over from putting together the big toys on Christmas Eve. Of course, the biggest mess occurs when unwrapping presents: torn paper everywhere, tissue paper strewn out of emptied gift bags, curling ribbon mysteriously in your hair, sticky gift tags annoyingly stuck to your feet. You try to keep it contained, but there's just too much of it.
And then there's the feast. The preparation mess of mixing bowls, mixing spoons, pots, pans, crumbs from your mid-baking cookie snacking (I know it isn't just me). The dinner mess of food that didn't quite make it from the casserole dish to the plate, and food that didn't quite make it from the plate to the mouth (also not just me). The scraping of half-eaten food from the dinner plates, the rinsing of crumbs off the near-spotless dessert plates. The drinking glasses left upon all the flat surfaces of your house, with no one to claim them. The rearranging and inevitable cleaning out of the refrigerator to make room for the leftovers.
Cleanup may not take so long, were it not for letting the dishes soak - yeah, that's it, soak - while you linger at the dinner table, laughing with the family. The recycling may have been taken out sooner if the kids didn't love to keep taking the tissue paper out of it to play with - and if we didn't secretly enjoy letting them. The trash may have also been taken out if we hadn't all been too busy testing out our new Christmas electronics. And the toys may have gotten put away, except - they're actually being played with - if just for this one day.
The mess must be dealt with eventually, but the relatives will be leaving sooner than you realize, and the wrapping paper isn't going anywhere (the tissue paper, perhaps). Whatever holiday you celebrate, I think family gatherings like this are times that even a professional housekeeper can enjoy a less-than-spotless house, guilt-free.
