We just did the exact same thing. Giant boxes of stuff sitting here waiting for me to take them back down to the basement. It's depressing, but not as depressing as still having sad Christmas decorations hanging around in February.
Plus I nagged at the kids to clean their rooms and get all their stuff out of the living room. I was a big drag, naggy dad tonight.
But then I made them awesome pasta and I'm letting them watch Narnia on TV until 10.

Yup, that was our day too. Took down the tree and the Santas, drove the tree out and chucked it under a bridge like we were disposing of a mob hit (they collect the trees for fish habitats). It's depressing, yeah. The house is dead quiet and half as cheery and I've instituted a "no more booze in the house" policy after a bit of an epiphany last night about my drinking habits, so I don't quite know what to do with myself right now.

Oh wait, I have comic books!

Hm. I didn't have a tree up, so I suppose that aspect of depressing wasn't available to me. I haven't decorated in years and years. I'd say it's partly bah-humbug, partly that nobody depends on me for christmas decor and partly laziness/disinterest.

I do hear you on the going back to school/work thing. I didn't take any time off for the holidays, but at least it was pretty slack. Back full-force tomorrow, though. Yuck.

I hate taking the tree down, too. Partly because I want the holiday season to trail off softly, and partly because I'm a staunch believer in observing the 12 days of Christmas, including three kings' day, I never ever touch them before Jan. 6, and usually not until the weekend after Jan. 6. So everything here is likely to stay up through the 10th, though I start gathering things into piles before that.

When you let it go for a few more days, I've found, it's not as bittersweet to let it go. By the time you do it you're really really ready to retire the beautiful Christmas season and move into the glassy bright part of winter and the new year. I usually use the putting-away of Christmas as a good excuse to thoroughly clean the whole LR, since with the needles and odd bits, you usually have to sweep and vacuum anyway. So it becomes sort of a nice cleansing ritual to pack it all away and say 'in with the new.'

Meanwhile, though, that's next week. My wise men are still trundling their way toward the creche for Tuesday's appointment.

Ours came down on New Year's Day. I couldn't wait to get rid of it this year. We got some upsetting news about our son between Christmas and New Year's, and that just ended the holidays for me. So I wanted the tree out of there and all the stuff packed away. I miss the twinkling lights, though. I liked those.

We took the tree down today too, garbage day is tomorrow but the joke is that we never actually got around to decorating it. We went away for the holiday and what with last minute shopping and packing, we never had time. So we had this giant ten foot tree in our front room for three weeks with not so much as a single ornament on it. Good thing it was a bargain.

Our tree got gone the day after Christmas Day. We went to Baltimore for a week on 12/27 and didn't want to come back to a dead brown tree. I wasn't ready to say goodbye to it!

The Xmas tree died on a trip to Italy in October 2007 and we didn't replace it so no tree taking down here.

(((Kangaroo))) [Just in case]

The holiday here doesn't end 'til Wednesday, after Ta Fota on Tuesday.

We have a goofy little tree, though; no one close enough to us sells anything like regular Christmas trees, so we got a live decorative cypress, about three feet tall, and that not until Christmas eve - at which point, we realized that we had thrown away our lights last year, I guess because they were getting old or whatever. So we had to rush out and get the closest available thing, tacky cheap Chinese strings.

V. calls it our Gypsy Christmas Tree, and its days are numbered. But it will look nice outside our front door, nude.

Wow, Ta Fota sounds like an ancient forerunner of the Polar Bear swim.

I took the tree down on Saturday and the outside lights down yesterday. I normally do it on New Year's Day, but was a little later this year. I expect by the time I get back from New York in two weeks there'll still be dead Christmas trees lying in people's front gardens. There's a particular bit of public land near the station where every year dozens of dead trees get dumped.

Miko, my Mom used the January 6th rule and applied it loosely as you do. I have adopted the tradition. I agree to leave them up/slowly pull stuff down till one is good and tired of it. I like shiny stuff.