MERRY CHRISTMAS
By Chris Johnson Co-Founder 12-21-2021
Thank you for reading Your Clutter-Free Story’s first ever blog post!
We are excited, thrilled, and delighted to begin this adventure with you.
With Christmas less than a week a way we wanted to share with you some of our thoughts about Christmas and Decluttering.
We look forward to Christmas as a chance to get to spend the day with our kids, and to enjoy having a day where we can relax and spend time with them. However, in years past, the weeks leading up to Christmas were always filled with stress.
What do we buy the kids? What do we do with what they already have? What toys can we get them that they will play with for longer than 4 months? Will we really get to spend Christmas day with our kids if they are in different parts of the house playing with their toys?
How about the weeks after Christmas. Time to put the holiday decorations away, but now there are all the various extra ornaments we got from our extended family or from church during the month of December; those decorations needed a home as well. Even with the one in and one out system we still seemed to have more stuff and less space.
It got to the point that even thinking about preparing for Christmas was stressful. At that point we decided that something had to change. We did a whole house declutter and it worked for a little while but then we got stuff in the weeks leading up to Christmas and we still had to figure out what to do with it all.
I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but one day my wife told me that she was done with the stress and clutter associated with Christmas and asked me what I thought about doing the big present from us as an experience gift that year.
What we would do is we would plan a day or two of fun and in January we would take them out on a Saturday (or two Saturdays) and after breakfast we would take them to museums, parks, restaurants, or other places we didn’t frequent during the year. For Christmas Day, we would print out pictures or cards and wrap them up and place them in a tree, or make a treasure hunt out of it.
We still got the kids things for Christmas, things that they absolutely needed like new pencils, or coloring books, or a new doll; however, instead of getting them a whole doll set with several dolls and their accessories they would get one doll, or instead of several coloring books and crayons and markers and pads it was one coloring book and a new small box of crayons if needed.
I remember how nervous I was that our kids would hate us for giving them crap for Christmas! I remember thinking “What kid wants to spend a full day with their parents and have that be their present and that there was no way that could be a present. Presents were toys and games and fun things they could open and play with at home.”
I felt like a horrible parent because now our kids would go back to school and all their friends would be talking about all the cool things they got from Santa and from their parents for Christmas and our kids would have to sadly say they got a bunch of envelopes that had a fun activity they could do with their family in January.
My wife and I talked and she asked me to trust her on this, and she assured me everything was going to be ok. So the first year our children got two days of fun, and I remember never having seen kids so excited for a present that wasn’t a toy or game or movie, and when we did our two days of fun in January they loved it! They got to spend those two days with their parents without interruption (we only used our phones for directions or discounts).
Christmas day was spent taking our time opening the presents they were able to play with that day and we were able to sit there and enjoy Christmas day. After Christmas was nice too because there wasn’t much we had to make room for and we were able to jump right back into things without all the extra stress.
If I had to choose just one thing I learned from this it would have to be this: children want time outside of the home with their parents more than they want toys, games, books or movies. I could have gotten my kids a Nintendo Switch, or an Xbox, or a PlayStation and sure they would have enjoyed it and I could have even sat down and played with them, but they don’t talk about it for years and years (a couple years ago I got the kids each their own xbox controller and a video game we could play together and they don’t really play the game anymore and they don’t even remember that they got the controllers for Christmas). Our kids still talk about wanting to go out and have an experience gift for Christmas because they have loved the ones the last couple of years.
Every family is different. Here at Your Clutter-Free Story we believe that every family has their own important story, and we’re here to help you with that story!
