The weekly pain & gain series has been a nice addition this year that has really spurned me to post more frequently. So I am going to try and finish the year off strong by not missing any posts for the rest of the year.

and the rest of the year sounds a lot like this…..

” for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home”

ah its the Holiday season and the radio has been playing music it seems like non stop. We are hustling and bustling but mostly with unpacking tasks and not necessarily with gobs and gobs of shopping. Which segues nicely to this weeks pain.

Pain

We have since moved all our belonging to the new apt. However, this doesn’t mean we are all done. No we have still many, many boxes to unpack and sort through. This week I decided to tackle the task of sorting through a few of these boxes.

First I tackled some relatively easy ones that housed clothing for the kids but then I decided it was about time that I start sorting through the paper bins.

Now this year I have really associated myself with minimalism. I think I have had many of the general practices for all my life but this year I was starting to ask myself some tougher questions. Yet one practice, I am constantly reading about, that I haven’t been able to do. Is just tossing out boxes that you haven’t looked at in month or even years.

Yup, I just can’t muster up the courage to just throw those items straight into the dump. I am scared to throw out something important along with the trash. After all it isn’t unreasonable to believe that many a people have lost important things in the rubble of unimportant clutter.

I know when I was younger I didn’t have a very good organizing system and so I am compelled to review everything before it is tossed. Searching for things I know I have missed placed. ( Like the 2nd copy of my son’s birth certificate.)

And reviewing paperwork sucks!

And its so soooo time consuming.

In 2 hrs I barely made it through 1/10th if that of a bin. Of course when you review old paperwork you also get lost in reminiscing. An article here and some pictures of that there.

I completely understand why you shouldn’t even open those Pandora boxes. But I still persist.

So my goal is to consolidate all my memory and paper items and in so doing hopefully assure myself that nothing important (valuable) is mixed in.

And I am trying to be extra vigilant to purge things at the door. Keeping things from entering the house is the first step.

😛 though this week I didn’t do very good on that.

Gain

This past week was full of activities and lots of fun pictures to go with it.

And we finally really got into the holiday spirit thanks to someones cast offs.

You see we are traveling for Christmas and we just moved…. So decorating wasn’t really high on my list… I mean we aren’t even really going to be here.

But I am actually really glad someone decided to give us their old artificial Christmas tree. When we finally decided to set it up it was like a light switch went on. Finally I was starting to get excited about the Holidays.

I’m not going to lie the stuff I’ve read this year has really zapped a lot of my carefree spirit. Now I see everything and I can’t help but think about the waste, excess and selfishness of it all. Specially in respect to resource consumption and Christmas was not free of this judgement. In fact Christmas seemed to be the epitome of the madness.

But putting up the Christmas tree made me realize I can celebrate with out being sucked into all the consumerism. After all what can be better then putting thing into practice. By accepting someones old tree we are reusing and saving it from the dump. It is also keeping us from buying a new one and hopefully somewhere down the line its also keeping one from being manufactured. Sure all the lights don’t work but to me it is serving its purpose. It has brought some cheer into the house and we are enjoying ourselves admiring it.

I also receive some early gifts by accepting some more hand me down clothes from a friend. Now my son is all set for shorts for next year and Minnie also received some more items.

We got to continue building on the holiday spirit by attending a Santa breakfast event that a friend invited us to attend.

All in all we did a very good job of keeping costs down by saying yes to some cast offs and yes to invitations from friends.

How are your days going? How is holiday prep going?