Over dinner at the second reincarnation of this chicken place in Pukekohe, B asked us the all important post-Christmas question of, ‘when will you take down your Christmas tree?’. I joked that we would still have it standing on the 17th of January so that we would have the pleasure of having M retrieve her birthday gift from under it.

M grinned, making a face and while we all laughed, deep inside, I was still baffled that a woman who has perfected thoughtful, tasteful and financially appropriate gift-giving could forego NOT putting up a tree in her flat. But that’s a boundary we didn’t want to cross; it’s her space and she had all the right in the world to do anything she wanted to do in it including NOT putting up Christmas decorations. It rankled, but I had to respect it.

The answer was that we didn't have a date, or rather, we left it to when we got around to doing a major start of the year clean-up which could be anytime up to the 1st week of February. It wasn’t really a big deal and besides, we liked having the twinkling lights.

‘Tradition states that you could have it up until the Epiphany- 12 days after Christmas- and if you don't, it would be bad luck.” B declares after having looked it up on Google.

Well then, nothing like the Asian in me to be immediately convinced at the mention of two words: ‘bad luck.’

We ended up removing all the Christmas decorations on the 1st of January.