The Art Of Post-Christmas Stuff Shedding

As I put away all of the gifts from under the Christmas tree, I—like most of you—find myself a little bewildered by the amount of stuff that I own.

I've moved twice in the past 13 months. In addition to those moves, I also rented a storage unit, then filled it, unfilled it, moved a small U-Haul truck to my mom's house in Virginia, and had a friend store a couch for me (which required him to take a door of its hinges just to fit the couch through). I've also helped several other families move over this past year. So I'm acutely aware of how difficult it is to move one's 'stuff.'

A friend once told me that she thought everyone should move every five years, "just to keep their amount of clutter cleaned out."

I agree.

So as I begin to put away my Christmas crap, I also begin that beautiful art of shedding some stuff. I fill up a bag of movies I no longer want, books that I've read, and music I no longer listen to, and I head to the store to sell it off. After this past year of moving, I'm surprised I keep any books or movies at all. We have the Internet to look up almost any article known to humankind. There's Spotify or YouTube to listen to any song we like. There's the local library—or Netflix—for all of your TV shows and movies. So why do we hang on to all this stuff?

Of course, I still have a lot of stuff because it's fun to go out and buy stuff. I'm like everyone else...addicted to stuff. Stuffaholic? Stuff addict? Stuffie? I don't know, but whatever you want to call it, I'm it.

Shedding stuff feels so good, though. It's almost a holy exercise. I mean, Jesus calls his followers to leave everything and follow him, right? Even for those of us who are devout-minded, it's so hard to really sell it all off and walk away from all that stuff.

But I'm writing because of paragraph 2 above. I've moved so much stuff this past year that I'm ready to confront my addiction and say 'the hell with it all.' One of the great things about my family's two moves is that we've downsized our living space. We threw out and sold off a lot of stuff. And it felt good. But live in a place for a few months, and the stuff starts to pile back up. And as the stuff piles up, I feel like a mini Amazon warehouse. I get another book, or DVD, and I have to find the shelf-space to store it. When that shelf-space fills up, I have a decision to make: Get rid of stuff, or buy another 'stuff' holder. I usually get rid of the stuff, thankfully. But another year passes, and I'm back to square one. It's a funny, ironic cycle.

My eventual goal is to whittle down my amassment until I can fit it all into about two boxes. Until then, the cycle continues. Thank God for Half-Price Books and the wonderful system of recycling my stuff to other suckers just like me.