Decluttering: getting rid of Christmas decorations
For most of my adult life, I have been collecting Christmas ornaments and decorations. The number of boxes have grown and grown over the years, until I had gotten to the point of having about ten large tote boxes of supplies that we would haul out of the storage room every Christmas season. Now that we are preparing to move overseas, I definitely did not want to save them all, but I am not quite ready to get rid of 100% of them either. I decided that my goal was to whittle them down to one tote box that we would leave in storage, along with my already whittled down photo collection. The company I am working for in England will pay towards a monthly storage fee, so we are planning to leave a SMALL number of things in storage before we head off to the UK next month.
First I went through and set out for our upcoming yard sale anything that was easy to replace such as lights and tinsel, as well as things I had never liked that much anyway. That left me still with the four boxes you see in the photo – which still wasn’t meeting my goal of no more than one tote box to store. So it was time to get ruthless!! So I went through them again, and only saved the actual tree decorations that meant the most to me, and included ones I had gotten from my parents over the years. These were things that couldn’t easily be replaced – and most had stories attached that were personally meaningful to me.
At this point, I have now gone through the belongings that were the most sentimental to me: photos, music and books, and Christmas decorations. This is important for our timeline because I will be moving to the UK to stay before Kerry does, which will leave him the final job of cleaning everything out of our house before we sell it. Therefore I wanted to make sure I had taken care of the things in which I am most invested before I leave for overseas. I don’t know if I will ever use these things again, but I am figuring I will be coming back once or twice a year to see family, and if over time we realize we aren’t going to use these stored things anymore, we can always jettison them later. There is a part of me that can’t let go of all our special mementos “just in case” we move back and set up home here again.
