Holiday Decluttering

It’s the end of the year. I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I certainly did. And as I am wont to do, I’m taking the time off to do a real staycation. This is my favorite time off every year. I stay at home and go nowhere. No big trips. No packing. No traffic. No long drives. That’s not to say I don’t do anything at all, but it’s all around the house.

Up this year? A thorough decluttering. I’ve actually already been running on the project for the last week or so. There’s a ton of stuff around the house. Stuff we haven’t used in years. My goal this Christmas vacation is to go through all of it and send it on its way to goodwill. So each day I tackled a different spot. Yesterday I decluttered (and cleaned) under the sink. It’s an area I haven’t really touched in probably three or four years.

Plenty of stuff we don’t need.

Lucky for me, we order a bunch of stuff from Amazon at this time every year. Stuff that comes in a slew of boxes. And so I’m emptying boxes as they come in (wrapping presents is on the agenda today as well), then filling them up with all the stuff that’s going to get donated. Hopefully at the end of all of this, we still have less stuff in the house than we have right now, even with all the Christmas gifts. (The big question is whether I can convince the kids to declutter their rooms too.)

The thing is, my house feels well past the saturated point. It’s like a sponge that’s just oozing water, if water is “stuff.” That makes it a lot harder to keep it clean and put-together. Decluttering like this is the equivalent of wringing out the sponge. I have to get in the right mindset to do it (I have this strange hangup over getting rid of stuff. It’s an unhealthy attachment to objects), but when I can get into that mindset, it can feel very freeing to be free of all the clutter.

So if you come over today and it looks like a tornado let loose somewhere in my house, you’ll know why.