As children, we all loved the holidays. All the presents and decorations and wonderful tasty treats—the stuff of everyone’s childhood memories! Conveniently for us, we didn’t realize what a tremendous amount of effort went into the beautiful memories our families created. Now we want to make the season magical for our own families and friends, but we often pay for the sense of wonder with a to‑do list that squashes our peace of mind and compounds our stress levels.

What if you spent the holidays in a spirit of family and celebration, instead of overwhelmed by stuff that doesn’t matter?

A big part of holiday labor is decorating. Given our predisposition to buy, buy, BUY, many of us have huge collections of holiday decorations already, and we add more every year. When it comes time to decorate, it can be like we’re opening a retail Christmas store in our homes. Tons of work, and then we’re drowning in decorations! Is it really necessary to go so overboard?

Maybe we overdo for the kids, or to conform to family tradition. Sometimes we do it because Christmas shopping is a great excuse to throw caution to the wind and give our inner compulsive shopper permission to come out and play. But “everything in moderation” can serve as a guide for holiday traditions. A few changes might make your holiday more enjoyable and less stressful, with more time for getting together instead of getting things ready.

I have a friend whose husband died in October after three years of battling cancer. She’s 76 and the matriarch of her family. She’s always hosted the big family gathering for Christmas, but this year she’s not up for it. She’s not feeling jolly, and it’s too much effort at her age to plan and prepare to host a party for 40 people. She sent an e‑mail to the family to say that it was time to pass the torch to the next generation—it was someone else’s turn to handle the huge affair.

Her announcement created an uproar! The whole family is freaking out. I believe that their panic arises from refusing to let their family tradition adapt to changing times. And they’ve never thought about the burden they were placing on my friend. They assumed that she would be in charge until she died. They’d be better off now if they’d shared the burden, reduced the effort required of any one person, and let their celebratory tradition evolve into something cooperative and flexible.

Are your family holiday traditions a source of joy or an annual burden? Do they still fit your available time, your budget, and your space? Now is a good time to ask these questions and make some choices—and maybe some changes.

What could you do differently? Every aspect of the season can be trimmed to lighten your load. Look at all the things that you normally do by default, and consider whether they still resonate with everyone. Your traditions may include some old habits that no one would miss! Could you enhance the magic of the season by reducing your workload and your seasonal clutter? What if you spent the holidays in a spirit of family and celebration, instead of overwhelmed by the stuff that doesn’t matter?

In the spirit of a clutter-free season, here are a few ideas for simplifying and streamlining the holidays for you and your loved ones:

For decorating:

• Thin down your collection of decorations to include only your favorites.
• Make a plan for the smallest acceptable amount of decorating.
• Don’t add anything new to the holiday decorating collection this year.
• Take time to experience other people’s holiday spreads in lieu of doing so much work yourself.

For gift-giving:

• Give experiences instead of objects.
• Give consumables, such as food and drinks.
• Focus on a few special and carefully chosen items instead of going for volume.
• Choose gifts that are portable and easily wrapped or bagged.

For activities:

• Choose activities that include as many people as possible.
• Everyone experiences the holidays in their own way, so be okay with those who opt out of an activity.
• Don’t overbook! Even though it’s the holidays, there are still only 24 hours in a day.
• Make an effort to try one thing that’s new and different. Maybe you’ll start a new tradition!

From The Clutter Fairy family to yours, have a peaceful and joyous holiday season and a happy—and less cluttered—new year! 

The article was also featured in our December 2011 e-mail newsletter. To subscribe to our newsletter, please use the “Subscribe” form, above right.

How do you get started organizing when you feel completely overwhelmed? One step at a time sounds logical, but it doesn’t answer the question, “Which step do I take first—and why?” Truly, when the task is big, any step is the right one. A start is what’s needed. So let’s talk about some quick and dirty ways to get unstuck and to begin the task of digging your way out of your project. Pretty soon, you’ll be sweeping up after the project is done.

1. Pick a five-minute task first—organize your sock drawer, or one kitchen cabinet, maybe the spice shelves, or the pots and pans.
2. Organize your purse—it’s a microcosm of your house! Empty it completely, throw out the trash, reduce the number of items you carry. Use zipper bags to collect similar items such as makeup or coupons.
3. Use a ticking timer as a way to keep you focused. Set it for short amounts of time (15 or 30 minutes), work until the timer goes off, then do the happy dance. Repeat as often as you’re willing, even if it’s only once a day.
4. Start by moving things back to the right rooms. Call it the first pass. Things are already messy, so moving things from room to room won’t hurt anything. Just pick up anything that’s not in the room where it belongs, and move it to the right one. Don’t worry if you have to make a space! There are sure to be things in that room that need to come out anyway, and that next move will free up space.
5. Pick a room, any room. Now pick a drawer, or shelf, or table top. Focus on clearing that one space. Don’t forget your timer! Throw out trash, relocate things to their appropriate places, straighten up and contain what needs to stay.
6. Here’s an easy one! Clean out the medicine cabinet. Get rid of all the expired drugs. Mix them into coffee grounds or cat litter and bag them tightly for the trash. (Don’t flush them down the toilet!) You can also drop them off at some pharmacies that will dispose of them properly.
7. Pick the worst closet—the one you can’t walk into. Set your timer, and just clear the floor. Throw out trash, make decisions about what to keep and what can be donated. Make your goal to clear the floor completely. If it means you have to pull something off the shelves to make room for something on the floor, then go ahead and make room. Either way, you’ll be pulling out donations and making it easier to walk into the closet next time without tripping.
8. Try the 27-pieces game! Take two bags and walk around the house. Pick up pieces of trash for one bag, pick up things to donate for the other bag. Keep going until you add 27 things to each bag. You don’t have to clean anything this way, you’re just hunting. Eventually you’ll get to 27, and you’re done. It’s a great way to start when you can’t decide on a place to sort yet.
9. Linen closets are easy! There are many big items and lots to donate. Sort the sheets and towels and take the leftovers to a veterinarian—they can use them, and you need the space. 

PROGRAM NOTES

Your bathroom is a very private place. Besides using it for the obvious reasons, you start every day there, getting showered, shaved, and coifed for the day. Later, you go back to get ready for bed. You spend a lot of time there, but most visitors to your home don’t. They use the other bathroom—the public one, or the one the kids use. That means your bathroom is your very own place to treat as you wish.

Here’s the problem: if a space in your house isn’t seen by the public, then it tends to get neglected. I’m always surprised that we’re motivated to clean a room when others will see it, but we have no energy for the spaces we use the most often. And we’re the ones who have to live with the mess every day, not our guests!

Bathrooms collect a certain kind of junk. More than any other room in the house, there’s a class of products that belong uniquely to this space. Body washes and hair gels, medications and first‑aid products—they collect under the sink and in the cabinets, and before you know it you’re drowning in bottles and jars. We buy way more products than we need because they smell good, and what’s one more bottle under the sink? But we can only use those products so fast, and if you’re buying faster than you’re using, you end up with exploding cabinets in the bathroom.

Bath products lure you to buy with the promise of peace and tranquility in a relaxing bath. But all those bottles and jars falling out of the cabinet certainly don’t deliver that experience. Instead, let’s thin out the contents and clean up the bathroom. Then you can really have a peaceful sanctuary each day.

Here are some ideas for reclaiming your bathroom:

Organize the bathroom as quickly as you can say, “Calgon, take me away!”

1. Acknowledge your product habit! Bath products are a cheap and easy indulgence. But it would take years to use the products you have right now! So stop buying bath products just because they’re a good deal. See how long it takes you to use up what you have. I bought eight Bath & Body Works products on sale 2½ years ago. I’m down to three now. That’s a bottle every six months. How many years’ worth of products are in your cabinet right now?
2. Time to thin the herd. You’ve tried tons of products that you didn’t like, but they’re still in the cabinet. Time to pass those on to someone else or throw them out. If the product is very old, it may no longer be safe to use.
3. All medicine cabinets need help. First, you’ve kept those meds way too long. Anything expired needs to go. Second, those little shelves can barely hold anything. Trying to stand everything up on those shelves guarantees it will all fall on your head. Find some narrow open containers to sit on the shelf to hold all the little doodads and tiny bottles that belong there.
4. Linen cabinets hold more than linens. Use the same container strategies in the linen cabinet that you use elsewhere in the house. Stacking boxes and slide-out drawers and trays will help control the contents you decide to keep. This is a great place for a lazy susan product, too. A two-tier lazy susan holds a lot of aspirin and cold medicine bottles.

PROGRAM NOTES

Our bedroom is our sanctuary. It’s where we go to sleep and get restorative rest. It’s where we go for naps—when we can spare the time for one! It’s where we share intimate moments with our partners.

Clutter can put a damper on everything that takes place in your house, especially in your inner sanctum. It creates a bunch of negative noise in your mind, and all that racket prevents restful sleep.

I once worked for a tall young man who piled all his clothes—clean and dirty—on the bed. When he was ready for bed, he slept crosswise on the bed with his legs hanging off the end and his feet on the floor. And he wondered why he was getting such terrible sleep! I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t move stuff even to sleep! But it was a perfect example of what people are willing to accept when they are overwhelmed.

What to do in the bedroom to create your perfect sanctuary? Here are some ideas:

1. Clear the floor so there’s a clean path to the bed. And not just by piling the stuff from the floor on the bed or other furniture!
2. More than any other room in the house, this is the room where you must minimize distractions.
   1. Keep only the furniture that you really need in there—don’t add spare items to this room. The less there is, the less junky it will feel, and the less furniture there is to pile up with stuff.
   2. If you can manage it, leave the TV outside the bedroom. It may help you fall asleep, but it’s also going to wake you up again later.
   3. Spend the three minutes it’ll take to hang up or put away the clothes you wore today. We all want to come home and quickly change to at-home attire, and the nice day clothes tend to end up in a pile somewhere. If you spend a moment hanging up just those clothes, at least there will be less to trip over on the floor.

Your bedroom should be a sanctuary.
3. Don’t use your bedroom as a storage or junk room. Your sanctuary is not the place for hiding stuff from public view.
   1. If you’ve run out of space elsewhere, it’s time to start sorting and purging those spaces. It’s not time to expand storage into the bedroom.
   2. Don’t let yourself hide stuff in the bedroom “just for the party.” It’ll never come out again!
4. Spend a weekend cleaning up the master bedroom closet. Most of the clutter I find in a bedroom is the direct result of the closet being unusable. The minute it gets hard putting things away, that process stops, and the piles on the floor start to grow. Sure enough, soon after the closet get out of control, you can’t get near it to use it at all.
   1. That means sorting and purging the clothes! If you have more clothes than will fit in the closet, you will never have a functional closet. You need to be able to hang up your clothes with some wiggle room to spare, or the closet doesn’t work.
   2. If you have the cash to spend, this is a good home upgrade that directly improves your life. From custom-built closets to Elfa shelves from the Container Store, it’s money well spent if you can improve the functioning of the closet every day.

PROGRAM NOTES

If you’ve made progress clearing paper piles in March, then cleaning up your home office is a great next step, because it’s not just the papers in the office that are out of control—the supplies and the equipment are, too! Removing the paper from the desktop and other surfaces uncovers what’s buried beneath. Now it’s time to deal with the rest of the office.

Here’s a strategy for putting your office area in order.

1. Collect the materials you’ll need to get started: a few sorting boxes, plus a trash can—and a recycling bin if you want. Mark the sorting boxes as follows: Relocate, Trash, File, Office Supplies & Equipment.
2. Sort everything in the room into one of those bins. Clear off the desk, the floor, clear out the bookcases and any chairs. You want to uncover every surface and empty every cabinet or shelf in the office.
   1. Relocate—This is where you put things that ended up in the office but are not really office items, like dishes, newspapers, or things from the bathroom. When sorting is done, carry these things out of the office to the appropriate room.
   2. Trash—This box is for the obvious things. When sorting is done, it goes out to the trash!
   3. File—Use this box for all the paper you need to keep. Hopefully, you’ve already filed everything from the previous project, but you may find some hidden items as you go through the office. If you do, file them away in your newly organized files.
   4. Office Supplies & Equipment—For your stapler, ruler, Post-Its, and paper clips. Don’t keep multiples! The goal is to pare down the supplies to a usable amount and stop trying to make space for supplies you’ll never use up. Plenty of teachers in the world need supplies, so donate them instead!

The home office: productive workspace or no man’s land?
3. Move the furniture around now. Once you’ve cleared off the surfaces, you can rearrange the furniture again so it’s more functional. Things were probably slowly added to the room over time, and the arrangement maybe be a hodge-podge. Now’s the time to work out the room layout that best supports your work:
   1. The phone should be within reach when you sit at the desk.
   2. Make sure you can reach your active files from the chair as well. That means using one or two desk file drawers. Other files can be behind you or to the side in a filing cabinet or armoire.
   3. Reference materials can be in bookcases across the room.
   4. Excess office supplies can be in a closet or armoire, in bins on bookcases, or in cabinets.
4. Re-dress the desk with only the things that you use almost every day. The rest can go in drawers or on shelves, etc.
   1. Only a few supplies need to be on the desktop. The rest can be in the desk drawers or in bins on shelves or cabinets. Use this guide—do you need it every day? If yes, better put it on top. If it’s not used every day, then put it away.
   2. Same rule with equipment—plug in the electric pencil sharpener, adding machine, and CD player somewhere away from the desk. For as little as they get used, they don’t need a space on the desk, and that gets some of the cords out from under your feet.
   3. Feel free to put out some décor items, but don’t crowd the desktop with them. You need that space to work, and a clear space is the answer. Place decorations on other surfaces within sight instead of on the desk.

My clients offer a lot of explanations for why they can’t part with the stuff that clutters their lives. Below are some of the reasons I hear the most often. I’d like to offer some ways to think differently about what to keep and what to let go.

“This cost me a lot of money.”

Okay, so what? Are you using it? Do you like it? If it’s just gathering dust because you don’t want to admit that you made a buying mistake, you have a problem. Sell the item on Craig’s List or eBay, donate it to charity for the tax write-off, or have a garage sale. If something has no other value to you, the fact that it cost a lot of money isn’t a good enough reason for it to waste valuable space in your life.

“My mother/friend/husband/child gave me this.”

Again I ask: do you like it? Are you using it? Does it fit your décor? Your mother or friend or husband or child will be happier with a lovely, uncluttered space than with a space cluttered by things you don’t need. If you’re worried about what they’ll think, offer to give the item back. Otherwise, thank your friends and family sincerely when they give you a gift, but if it’s not your cup of tea, pass it on. Look around the house—there are probably plenty of other gifts that you are keeping. Let go of the ones that you don’t want or use.

“This belonged to my deceased parent/friend.”

This is a hard one—very hard! Sometimes we think we need to hang on to the object to honor or keep alive the memory of the loved one. The truth is that you probably don’t need a lot of stuff to trigger your memories of the most special people. Whenever you talk about them or look at photos, the memories will be there. You won’t lose that love just because you give away the things. Keep one or two precious objects, but let the rest go to a new home.

“I’m going to fix this someday.”

I doubt it! If you really wanted to fix and use it, you would have done it already. Let someone else handle the repairs—someone with a clear and current need for the thing. Especially if you’ve already replaced the broken object with a working model, it’s time to let the old one go.

“I can’t decide if I need this or not.”

Fair enough. Create an “outbox” in your garage or utility room. Put the item that you can’t decide about in there, and leave it for a week. If you haven’t found a need for it and retrieved it within a week, you can probably give it away.

“This belongs to my kids.”

Your house is not your kids’ storage unit. Teach them about ownership and responsibility for their possessions by asking them to manage their own stuff, rather than continuing to store it for them.

“We used to use this all the time.”

Everyone changes over time. What was important then may not be today. You must reevaluate your possessions against your new priorities, not your old ones.