Holiday Simplicity Hacks
Tricks of the trade shouldn’t be consigned to a couple of months each year. Yet for those of us ever in pursuit of simplicity, the holiday season presents an especially tricky two months to navigate. In our family, add a couple of birthdays into the mix and we have all the makings of consumerism tumult come November. What to do?
This year I’d like to share some simplicity hacks. (Hmmm, sounds like a hashtag in the making, #simplicityhack perhaps?) And I would love to hear your simplicity hacks, too. Here’s an example relevant to our household this very day.
A month ago, not in preparation for this post, but in anticipation of the clutter that inevitably makes its way into our home between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I decided to completely empty a junk cabinet in our kitchen. Everything went into a trash bag that I put in a corner of the garage. Then using Awesome Note, I created a To-do that would buzz one month later. The note reminded me of the previous month’s purge, asked me to assess whether or not the family missed any of the items, and prompted me, assuming nothing was missed, to go all the way and get rid of the stuff permanently. My wife and I also gave ourselves a rule that, while we wouldn’t bring up the topic of the missing stuff with our kids, if any of them all on their own asked for a toy that had previously been in the junk cabinet, we would go into the garage and get it out of the trash bag. Results?
Over the last month, one of three children have requested one toy. Our Bop It is now safely out of the bag and back in the house. For the last month the junk cabinet has turned into the tranquility cabinet. It has remained empty. And you know what? No one has cared. No one has even noticed. We haven’t even talked about it. In the last month our youngest daughter has scored her first goal in a soccer game; our middle daughter has put in fifteen extra hours a week of Irish dance practice preparing for the Oireachtas; our oldest daughter has learned how to do dressage courses; countless happy family hours have been had; lots of tween tears have been shed; and many more things besides. All this without noticing that there’s nothing in the former junk cabinet.
Simplicity Hack: identify a place in your house that accumulates stuff and decommission it throughout the holiday season. How many places can you decommission between now and Christmas?
Let me know your simplicity hacks. If you have an especially good one, I’ll share with the 100TC community.
Comments
A couple of years ago I realized that I was lugging bins up from the basement, filled with many decorations that we didn’t love and had no place for in the home. The routine had been:
carry a dozen boxes and bags upstairs filled with stuff
put the about half of the stuff out on the tree and around the house
carry all the empty stuff back downstairs.
In January do it all in reverse.
Then two years ago, I lugged the bins and bags and boxes to the living room, decorated the house, then boxed up the leftovers and took them to the charity shop. There were things in there that I just didn’t love anymore, things that used to fit in the old house but had no place in this one, and a number of old things that had been hand-me-downs from parents and grandparents. Like the rest of life, Christmas is easier with fewer things.
For me, the simplicity is more about my mind. There is always one thing that I avoid doing for an extended period of time – sewing loose buttons, filing paperwork, tossing out socks that have lost all their partners (I buy at least 2 replica pairs so that I can lose 1 and then 2 but still have a pair), cleaning out the fridge.etc. For the holidays – my winter holiday, my birthday, and Valentine’s Day, I do that one thing that has been niggling at my brain so that I can calm my mind. It isn’t exciting, but it is a gift I give myself.
I don’t buy specialized wrapping paper. Instead I use brown paper, the type you use to wrap parcels for the mail. At Xmas I might decorate it with a rubber stamp that says Ho! Ho! Ho! or with pine cones from the lawn but that’s about it. I write the recipient’s name directly on the paper. Whether it’s birthday, wedding, or Xmas, I use that same brown paper. All I need is two rolls, one I’m working on and one in reserve. Some people suggest using newspaper but I find it gets your hands black, which isn’t simplifying things.