AAround the holidays, things get crazy. It’s inevitable.
We ended up with some unexpected family and friends in town that lent a bit more chaos to the normal frenzy. Nothing like five extra bodies to really ring in the cheer! Some people might have brought out the champagne, but we’re more of an Irish car bomb crowd.
Things got out of hand pretty quickly, but I digress…
More to the point is all the stuff. The bins come out of the garage and the decorations go up. Extra food and drink are stashed on every counter and the beer fridge is loaded up.
The tree is in the living room along with the army of nutcrackers over by the turntable. Holiday cheer seems to be hanging from every hook and hiding in every corner.
Not to mention that in a relatively small house like ours, a tree in the living room is something that you have to make room for. A lot of walking around the tree.
With guests in town, we have to get out the extra plates ($1 for holiday themed settings at the thrift store!). We usually keep the cabinets as slimmed down as best we can. No place settings for 10 laying around.
Oh, and my nice minimalist closet? What a perfect place to stash the endless stream of Amazon deliveries!
The bins, of course, never fully go away until it is all said and done a few weeks later (which just happened and inspired a little reflection on my part).
Personally, I could forgo the decorating. I don’t want to be a total scrooge, but seriously! Why add to an already chaotic time by just obliterating any sense of sanity around the house.
I’m all for dropping a little ‘Blue Christmas’ vinyl on the record player, but that would be all I need.
People around the proverbial campfire (or real one) are all talking about how manic the holidays are. Well, a little dose of saying ‘no’ to certain things would help. In the end, it seems we’re all helpless.
This is a battle I know I’ll never win. It is a full-on 3 against 1 on this issue in my house. The majority has spoken, and all I can do is manage it as best I can (that and sneak some unused stuff and old wrapping paper into the garbage when no one is looking).
The Compliment
In the middle of all of this insanity, while I was internally going out of my mind and nursing it with Guiness, my brother-in-law complimented me on how minimalist we’ve been able to keep our home.
Minimalist, now? Seriously? There is no flat surface without stuff piled on it!
But I guess he could see through all the temporary clutter to the bones of the place. I really appreciated his insight despite the extra five people and buckets of holiday cheer.
We ended up talking about it a bit, and he shared the challenges they are facing in their own home.
It’s always interesting to me to hear about the real sticky spaces that most of us have and can’t seem to get control over. For him, apparently it’s the basement (sound familiar to anyone?). It seems that no matter how much comes out, it just can’t get to a comfortable baseline level.
What part of the house do you have trouble with?
It’s also fascinating how much these areas weigh on our minds. Not that they necessarily keep us up at night (at least not every night), but the thought of his basement, or for me the garage, sneaks in there often enough.
Yet we have some mental block about permanently taking care of the situation.
No time, no space, no incentive when the stuff is hidden away.
What’s Normal?
This thought literally just dawned on me as a am writing this. Let me know what you think.
I believe his compliment was also a bit of a commentary on what we generally expect when we visit people’s homes.
I mean, here I was just trying to breathe through this scenario where everything seemed out of control, yet one of my guests was complimenting me on how decluttered and minimalist my home was.
It begged the question, if this is minimalist what is normal?
Unfortunately, I think we all have a pretty good sense of what the American ‘normal’ has become – too big a home filled with too much stuff, a storage unit for what doesn’t fit in the house, garages, basements, closets and attics filled with boxes we can’t seem to get rid of.
Normal? It’s nuts.
People are drowning in stuff at the same time they are drowning in debt. The personal storage industry houses almost 2.5 billion sqft of space and pulls in $38 billion a year. One click shopping from our phones is as mindless as watching TV.
The holidays are an especially interesting reflection on this as we all do our best to digest the flood of new items that has infiltrated our homes (and that we have bestowed on our friends and family out of generosity and love, but also habit).
What stays and what goes? Do you make room for the new by getting rid of the old? Or do you not really like the new if you have to be completely honest?
Homeostasis, 85%
Things have gotten back to normal and now I’m breathing a bit easier.
I wanted to let my kids pack up everything since they had brought it out, but when I saw them wrapping ornaments made of yarn in half a newspaper to protect it, I had to intervene for the sake of space efficiency.
One upside of pulling everything out is that not all of it has to go back in. It is always a good idea to take that opportunity and see what you actually used, what is broken or out of style, or what you have redundancy on.
With the repack, I took my four holiday bins down to three. It was mostly due to my tetris skills, but also some things were ready to go.
Minimalist? Hardly.
But, in general, anytime I can do that I’m pretty happy.
As I sit here enjoying a decluttered space, and some peace and quiet, I really believe it’s good to reflect on these crazy times, how they make us feel, and how what we need to do to reel it back in.
I’m nowhere near where I want to be on this journey towards a more minimalist home and life, but I feel like I’m on the right track.
And if a guest in my home feels that way when it was at its worst, well then maybe I’m a bit further along the path than I thought.