Let’s tidy up!
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Two serious cleaning seasons
At my home there are two serious cleaning seasons. First comes at spring and prepares the house for Easter and the second starts before Christmas.
My mum plans everything beforehand and organizes the whole family into teams. There are five of us at home and there is always enough housework to go through the whole fortnight before Christmas for everybody. After that the house is shiny for three to two days and just in front of our eyes everything goes back to normal. As I said there are five of us and our flat is just too small to keep it tidy at all or at any times.
It’s not a big deal
For my family Christmas cleaning is not a big deal. We just specialize at performing different chores. My father loves cleaning windows. My mother is fond of ironing. I don’t mind cleaning the cupboards. When the time comes, we are busy as bees. It’s not tiring and we don’t get sad with overwhelming amount of tings to do. We just get organized and in few days the house looks just as if we have just moved in. After that, there is only shopping for presents left and this is the real challenge.
It’s a disaster
Every year my father forces me to help my mother with cleaning before Christmas. To me it’s a complete disaster. There are too many things my mum wants to do. She wants everything to be sparkly clean. She probably thinks I’m a robot or something. And I always wonder why I am not allowed to help my dad. Is it all just because I’m a girl? Are my parents being sexists? It’s really tough with my five year old brother around. Whatever I do to help my mum he just destroys, by pouring something sticky on just-cleaned carpet for example. He scatters the toys around when I’d managed to find place for all of them. And my work seems to have no ending…
We appreciate what we did
There is no serious trouble with cleaning before Christmas at my house. We are to mature for making mess all the time. Once something has been washed, cleaned or polished it stays this way until Christmas. We appreciate it a lot now because it had not always been like that. When we were children our parents only tried to keep the house tidy.
I hate it
I hate the before-Christmas-cleaning. We try to tidy everything. Sometimes we find skeletons in the closet and it gets interesting because a lot of explanations need to be invented on the spot. But most of the time it is just segregating useless clothes from the ones that can be worn. I get depressed with how ugly and unfashionable my wardrobe is! Besides, the coming Christmas always means cleaning the windows and washing the carpets and this is something I purely detest.
Improve your vocabulary!
beforehand – z góry
fortnight – dwa tygodnie
chores – prace domowe
overwhelming – przytłaczający
amount – ilość
sparkle – błysk; błyszczeć
tough – trudny
scatter – rozrzucać
mature – dojrzały
purely – całkowicie
detest – nie znosić, nie cierpieć