Haul Out The Holly! And Haul It Away!

The holiday season has now officially begun! Thanksgiving has come and gone – and with it our waistlines. Black Friday dropped like a rock through a plate glass window; I don’t know about you but it was so crazy I still feel shattered by it! Did you survive? Did you hit the midnight madness sales? Valuing sleep above all else, I decided to wait to shop until after the craziness subsided a bit…seriously, I had no need to race through a large big box store looking to spend my hard earned money on deals I wouldn’t normally partake of anyway. Besides, I’d read stories of people using mace on fellow shoppers to gain an advantage on the selection of merchandise! That’s crazy! It’s unfortunate that such circumstances bring out the extreme in people, but it’s a sign of the times: high unemployment rates, a limping economy, and a housing market that’s still anemic. That’s a clue to settle down a bit, become reflective, and remember we’re all a part of the big picture. We need moments of calm this hectic time of year, and there’s all kinds of ways to ground yourself, reduce your stress, and keep a perspective on your life and the role you play in everyone else’s. One of the ways I take care of myself is to declutter and purge my place after I decorate for Christmas; it gives me focus and calm as I bring peace and order to my home. I’ll share with you a few ways to take control of your space while managing your hurried holidays and keeping on top of the mess before it happens.

What makes the season a mental melting pot of disarray is that process by which we bring out all our decorations and trimmings once a year to load our homes up with festive decor for a few weeks, only to have take it all down and put it all away shortly thereafter. It seems like a real time monster, having to spend hours and hours hauling out boxes and bags of bits and bobs, strings of lights and garland, villages and nativities and the like. Many people would love nothing more than to live Christmas 24/7/365. That’s real love and dedication to the holiday spirit! But for me a little goes a long way. Last week’s article talked about getting the best look out of your existing decor without adding too much more to it, and how to avoid making your home seem or feel overdone, stuffy or busy. My MWMB (Mid-Week Mini-Blog) the week before started the theme off by discussing how to formulate your game plan to incorporate the setting up of and taking down of each holiday theme. So now I want to take a deeper dive, reach a little farther into this realm of chaos and give you some ideas and tips to set yourself up for future successes year after year when the holiday madness descends upon us. My goal is have you take these ideas and apply them for each event you have – whether it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween or the Fourth of July- so that your precious time is spent enjoying other of your life’s pursuits and spending less time and effort trying to make sense of the chaos and comedy of the holiday season.

It’s just a fact, plain and simple, that we bring more and more stuff into our homes than we get rid of. If you think about the average consumer’s shopping habits, you’ll see that we purchase things in dribs and drabs, a little here and a little there. What winds up happening is that we slowly accumulate more and more stuff that over time becomes junk. It’s when we feel the pressure or need to declutter, it’s because all those little trips to the department store that resulted in the mound of accumulated stuff is now taking over our basements, attics, garages, cupboards – any little place you find to store your items. That’s when the big purge usually occurs and in one fell swoop we downsize our mess into something more manageable or at least reasonable to contend with.

What you want is to NOT get to that point of mental breakdown, where the clutter and mess dictate your mood and attitude toward your stuff. If you take a little time to just manage and organize it while you have it out you can help alleviate the stress from sorting it all out and make life a bit easier. Since Christmas is our next uber holiday on the horizon, let’s make an organized plan and see how we can work with our existing items to downsize, reduce, reuse or recycle all the things that are duplicative and that you don’t want, don’t need, or are just tired of having them. The first step to success is deciding to organize and downsize your things into a more controllable state. The next step comes from taking to time to do this while you’re setting up the current holiday decor, tackling the problem head-on at the time. It’s a great way to make impactful results in the ‘here and now’ instead of putting it off for later, when most lamely later will arrive looking like that mental breakdown I mentioned before…

As you bring your various boxes and bags out, take a look at how you’ve previously organized all your holiday decorations: are they neat and tidy or are they just randomly shoved into any available box or container you have handy? Are your storage boxes made of cardboard (and starting to look their age or well beyond), and are the bags crumpled, wrinkled, and falling apart from many years of use? Are the boxes and bags you store your things in of various sizes, making stacking and storing a bit of a challenge? Well, if you can answer YES to any of the above, it’s time to rethink, first and foremost, HOW you store your decor so that, going forward, your space is neater, your time isn’t wasted endlessly searching, and stress isn’t even a consideration. What I have done for many clients and recommend to friends who ask, is to get medium and large opaque plastic storage boxes from places like Costco, Sam’s or The Container Store. As I said before, being able to see into your boxes makes it easier for you to view most or all of your decorations without having to open all the various boxes and look inside. And, if you organize them by color or type or size, you know exactly where all the silver bells and holly and ivy are located. This is a cost investment initially, but you’ll get years and years of use from them, and you’ll find many other uses for them as well as you find creative ways to store and keep your keepsakes.

The next investment is simply your time: time spent going through and reviewing what you have and determining what you what to keep and what needs to go, through regifting, donation, or simply thrown out. Yes, it’s going to take some time doing this, but every commitment to an organized method of storage requires thought and care. How you store and what you store in your boxes and basements go hand in hand. I mean, why would you want to box and keep broken ornaments or strings of lights that don’t work? Why would you want to put those things back in boxes you can’t see through which makes you repeat the whole process the next year? Take the time as you bring out each box to go through it and determine what you can donate to your local charity, community center, nursing and care facility or library. There’s many options to choose from. Find the one that makes you feel like you’re really helping out and commit to downsizing by giving to one of many viable and worthy business, organizations or resale shops in need. Locally, there’s a great campaign called Ornaments for Officers, where your gently used or new condition ornaments are resold with he profits going to Backstoppers, an organization which provides financial assistance to the families of police, firefighters and EMS workers killed in the line of duty. While you’re deciding what gets donated, have a thick garbage bag – an old cardboard box you’re transitioning from (hint, hint) – to put all the items in that are not worth keeping or donating. Yes, holiday decor does break, and more often than not it happens when we put them back in their storage boxes. Take the time to discard all the broken and non-working items so that, come next year when you open up your holiday decor storage, your boxes should be full of things in perfect condition and working order. And you’ll be a lot happier having done so with this initial time commitment!

Finally, the hardest thing to do is to debate and weigh over things you keep – the meaning behind them, the sentimentality, the need or desire of keeping it. So many things to consider! But be practical in your consideration: is anything duplicative and, therefore, need to be kept? Do you have things that mean a great deal to you – perhaps family heirlooms you don’t want to get rid of but also may not want to have out for fear of breakage? Do you have far too many strands of lights that, when strung on your tree, might pose a safety hazard? These are serious and important things to think about; taking this time up front to determine your attachment is time well spent and will provide more value to you for those items you keep. If, in the case of of family heirlooms you want to save but not use, put them in an opaque box and clearly mark them as such, as FAMILY HEIRLOOMS – DO NOT TOUCH. It may just be a case of preserving them for posterity to hand down to your family at another time. The point is that this way, every time you go to this box, you’ll know exactly what’s in it, why it’s there, and you’ll remember why you labeled them accordingly in the first place. These are the tough decisions to make – deciding what to keep based on your level of attachment – and yes, it’s not always an easy choice. Nor do you have to decide between YES and NO. Having options will help you come to a point where, with most of these items, you’ll realize that they’re just stuff, and you probably didn’t need them all to begin with. Once you’ve faced this reality, you’re less likely to invest in other decorative bits you don’t need, and your pocket book will be happier for it. So haul out the holly, and literally, HAUL IT AWAY!