Creative Changes Blog

When Holiday Decor becomes New Year's Clutter

The ritual of bringing out the Christmas decorations and putting up the tree is my way of getting into the spirit of the Holidays. I love to sit and look at the lights on the Christmas tree, and the collection of holiday cards displayed on the inside of the front door gives me pleasure too - briefly. By New Year's Eve I am done with all of it. What starts out as beautiful seasonal decorations turns into more clutter than I can stand and it all gets packed away for next year before we ring in the New Year.

BUT - there is always a collection of stuff that seems to take weeks to find all of the appropriate storage spots.

What to do with:

• The beautiful holiday cards
  

• Those thoughtful gifts that you really have no use for
  

• Bits of ribbon and gift boxes that seem too good to just throw away
  

• The items that need to be returned or exchanged
  

• The three Christmas decorations that did not get packed into the decoration box that is now neatly on the top shelf of the garage
  

• And last, but not least - if you have young children you also have the mountain of new toys on top of the mountains of toys they already had
  

It can all get to be completely overwhelming, so you have to come up with an easy plan and stick to it until your house is back in order. As Nike beautifully states - Just do It.

I like to get the horizontal surfaces cleared off first. Collect up all the wrapping things and get them stashed in the wrapping box. Cruise through every room of the house looking for the stray decorations and make one last trip to the garage storage with those.

The holiday cards always pose a dilemma - are you going to write back to some people? Keep those in your to-do file. Are you really going to create that wonderful craft project you saw in a magazine with the rest of the cards? Be realistic about that probability. Yeah, I didn't think so. Let them go. You enjoyed them, now they are done.

The gifts that you really have no use for might make a great donation to your favorite charitable cause. If you know that you will not use an item - don't keep it, let someone else enjoy it, or return it to the store, if you can.

There are always those gifts that are good, but just the wrong size or color - just a quick exchange. Make the time to do that and give yourself a deadline so it gets done before the receipt expires.

Toys, toys, toys. How many toys can your child play with at the same time? How many do they play with on a regular basis? Do they really need all the toys accessible all the time? How about taking some of the toys that they may have lost interest in, and storing them in a bin in the garage, to make room for the new Christmas things. In a few months you can rotate the toys again and keep all the toys more interesting in the process. While you are sorting and rotating, you can also cull out the broken bits and pieces.

My goal is to start the New Year with a clutter free house. Once the tree is down and decorations put away I am inspired to spruce up the living room a bit. Seems like a good time to try a new furniture configuration and switch the accessories around a bit too.

May your New Year begin with order in the house!

Until next time,

Sandra

"Minds are like parachutes - They only function when open."
Thomas Dewar

I really like this quote because it helps me to keep my parachute mind wide open all the time. I just know that there is so much information that I do not know, but want to soak up, that is out there in great books, cyberspace, and through interesting people I may meet. I don't want to miss a thing! My biggest hurdle seems to be the limited hours in each day to learn it all, see it all and do it all.

Here are a couple of new items I learned about from the blogosphere recently:

The first is a great book called A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink. Mr. Pink has a theory about why the Right-Brainers will rule the future. As a right-brainer - I like how he thinks! He also has some great exercises to expand your right brain if you tend to be more left-brained.

My second new find is a blog site called Bootstrapper
This is a small business resource with lists of resources and articles about every aspect of starting and running a small business. I think a lot of the organizing information applies to homes and home offices that are not necessarily a business.

Running a home IS like running a business. You have inventory in and inventory out ( food, clothing & belongings ) that needs to be tracked. Money (income) coming in and then allocated to expenses going out. The space where all this takes place ( your home ) needs to be efficient, comfortable and maintained for all of the business of LIFE to work smoothly. So, even if you do not have a specific small business that you run from your home, don't disregard the small business information and articles, because you may be missing out on some great gems of wisdom for running your household.

Remember to keep your parachute open!

Until next time,

Sandra

This is a personal story that I told to a client recently, to try to help her with some decision making she needed to do in order to achieve her organizing goals. The story seemed to touch a nerve for her, and she then had a more clear understanding of the burden that some of her belongings were creating in her life, and that she was keeping certain things out of perceived obligations to other people.

My Mothers Birds


My mother had a collection of beautiful little bird figurines. Some were elegant crystal and some were hand made pottery, or wood. All were different, and special, gathered over a period of many years. My mother loved animals of all shapes and sizes, and was a champion for animal causes. That bird collection was such a statement about who my mother was.

After both my parents had passed away, I was able to make the decisions about most of their belongings, except for a small pile of boxes of very personal things, including the bird collection.

It seemed like such a dilemma to me as to what to do with these beautiful figurines. I believe some of them were expensive, many of them were hand made, and some of them were made specifically for her. I had no place in my tiny house for the collection, but more importantly, it was HER collection. I thought of selling them on E-Bay, but that seemed like a big bother and not in keeping with my mother's sensibilities. Finally, after a couple of years of looking at the boxes, I decided to sell them at our spring yard sale.

The night before the yard sale I unpacked all of them and set them up on a table to try to price them. I was stuck again. I had no idea what monetary value they had. Their true value was what they meant to my mother and I could not put a price tag on that. That was an Ah - Ha moment for me. All of a sudden I was able to let them all go, except for just a few of my favorites, because I realized that I was hanging on to memories, and that I did not need to keep all those figurines in order to keep my memories.

I set up a special table for the bird collection at the yard sale, and I let people pay whatever they wanted for the birds. There were men, women and children who were entranced with these beautiful figurines, and they all seemed to take a lot of pleasure in looking them over and choosing their special birds. I felt that we all honored my mother, who was a most generous person, by spreading the joy of that collection as wide as we could. Each person who purchased one of those birds went away with a smile and a treasure in their hands, which in turn gave me great pleasure. I felt certain that my mother was pleased also.

As Peter Walsh so perfectly states, "We are not our stuff".

Creating a new, beautiful memory of the bird collection was such a perfect way for me to let it go, physically and emotionally.

Until next time,

Sandra