Posted in Decluttering and Organization

As the Colossal Clutter Clean Up is fast approaching its starting date of January 7th, Amy has started us off with a little warm up exercise before we begin. As we all take down our christmas decorations and pack them away for another year she has encouraged us to take a deeper look at them and decide which of them we really truly need, which are sentimental and out of all of the sentimental ones how many do we "truly" need?

This is a tough job! I have an awful lot of decorations, more than I need to fully decorate our tree but have been hanging onto them year after year just in case. As the children removed them from the tree we sorted them out into little groupings: the babies first christmas & mom and dad's first christmas ornaments, special antique ornaments that grandma had passed along to us, my really beautiful snowglobe ornaments that I have gotten over the years and then the regular coloured christmas ball ornaments. We have a ton of the christmas ball ornaments. Some of them are slightly damaged and others are missing hangers but you know I still have them (I had planned to replace the hangers and so on). So they were the first to be picked out for removal. Then we sorted through them some more and picked out any extra special ones that we really like with paintings on them or glitter and saved them and all of the rest were packed up for donation to the goodwill.

Then I tackled the christmas light collection that has grown over the years. How many sets of lights do I really need? This year we only used one strand of multi coloured lights that flash and do all sorts of funky things : ) I must have at least 10 strands of clear lights that I used to use on the tree before the children were born. I know, how boring as my husband would say. Hence this is why they are no longer used! So off they went into another bag to either be sent to the goodwill or to my mother who does a lot of lighted crafts. She may find a good use for them.

Last on the list was all of the little knicky knacky stuff that just sort of grows over the years. The santa doorknob hangers (I have quite a few), the many different christmasy candle holders that I got from who knows where anymore, the wooden snowmen that are supposed to hang on the fireplace but never do because when we light the fire they have to be removed and so on. Many of these items were also bagged for the goodwill where they can find a new home with someone who is more in need of them than we are : )

A job well done. We now have the really important things that we enjoy the most left and the others that spend most of their time in storage ready for their new homes.

Blessings, BChsMamaof3

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me." Psalm 51:10