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Here's the good news about volunteering to host your neighborhood Christmas party: You have to clean your house.

Here's the bad news about volunteering to host your neighborhood Christmas party: You have to clean your house.

Gah! YOU HAVE TO CLEAN YOUR HOUSE!

So, OK. I think of my house as being mostly clean-ish most of the time. Sort of. No one has ever suggested I try out for that one show "Hoarders." At least to my face. And I've never had a visit from the health department. Except for that one time when we all had viral hepatitis and the health department people strapped bells around our necks and made us stand on the front porch, shouting UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN! whenever other humans approached us.

I think this is a pretty good track record for someone who had a lot of boys and also hairy dogs living under the same roof. Don't you?

But!

When you realize you're going to have a lot of people over — people who aren't related to you and who don't even necessarily know very much about you except for the fact that you have a lot of weird gnomes in your front yard — you start looking at your house with fresh eyes. And that's when you realize you've been suffering from an acute case of "house blindness" — a condition where you've stopped seeing a pile of books here and a stack of boxes there, stuff that you meant to put away but never actually did.

This is what happened to me last weekend.

Thanks to the efforts of our fabulous neighbors Linda and Tish, our street in the Avenues has had a holiday party for years. Different people have taken turns hosting the event, and this year I thought I should act like a grownup (for a change) and volunteer to have people over here at Chez Cannon.

That's when I noticed the Hedgehog shrub trimmer lying in our entryway. You know. The very same Hedgehog shrub trimmer that's been there since I last trimmed the barberry bushes. IN MAY.

I'm pretty sure I meant to put it away when I was finished. I must have walked into the house after showing those barberry bushes who's boss and set it down with the thought I'd take it downstairs later. It's just that I didn't think "later" meant "the first weekend in December."

Meanwhile, my husband and I apparently stopped seeing a power tool sitting there in our entryway for the past seven months, although I'm pretty sure other people must have noticed. I mean, who wouldn't? I'm pretty sure I would notice random power tools sitting in your entryway, for example.

But that's how house blindness works. You stop seeing what's there. Until, of course, you have a party at your house.

So I had two choices. Either I could throw some tinsel and holly at the Hedgehog and leave it sitting there in my entryway, or I could take it downstairs where it belongs. Which I did. I also shelved books, threw away a pile of outdated phone books, made a couple of DI runs, wiped old dog spit off the walls, threw away some old lima beans in my freezer, hung up a coat or two that had taken up permanent residence on the backs of our dining room chairs, and pulled out our Christmas decorations.

It was exhausting. But when the neighbors showed up on Saturday evening, it was worth it.

Totally totally worth it.

Merry Christmas, friends.

Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.