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WASHINGTON—Professional organizer Caitlin Shear and I
have been diligently combing through the clutter in my
attic in search of organization. So far, we have
finished what Caitlin calls zoning—the act of grouping
similar items together, such as books, photographs or
clothing—to see what has actually been hiding up there
for the past few years.
Now we
have begun the work of sorting through each individual
zone.
We
started with holiday decorations for one reason: I
thought it would be easy. It was a messy pile of boxes,
long-plastic bags filled with wrapping paper, and a
bunch of loose bows and gift tags. But compared with
other zones, it didn’t contain much stuff to sort
through.
When I
was in college, I used to tease my mother that she’d
failed Christmas 101. The holidays were always a weirdly
austere time in the four-room Brooklyn apartment where I
grew up. There wasn’t room to store much, so she never
bought many holiday decorations. For sure, we’d put up a
real tree in the living room and hang a real wreath that
she’d bought from the vendor standing outside the
entrance to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on 92nd Street.
Sometimes she’d set up an Advent calendar on the
marble-top table in the foyer and, on another table, a
basket for the Christmas cards that would trickle in
during a three-week period in December. There was no
fireplace, so no greenery on the mantel; a stocking for
me dangled from the living room bookshelves.
And that
was pretty much it. So when my husband, Bob, and I moved
from the West Coast to Washington in 1999, my parents
arrived for their first visit carrying an enormous box
containing all of their tree ornaments. “I just figured
we’d probably start having Christmas here,” Mom said, as
the box dangled off my father’s left shoulder.
About
three years later I bought two rectangular ornament
boxes and took the best of my parents’ stars, Santas and
balls and combined them with what I had acquired over
the years. Every Christmas since then, I’d grab those
two boxes from the attic, never bothering to notice what
else was accumulating up there.
As
Caitlin and I plunged in, she seemed happy to hear this
family history, because it meant that my holiday stash
is actually pretty manageable. Many of her clients have
lots of the trappings of decorations for every
conceivable holiday: wreaths, trees and mantels to
decorate, full sets of holiday china, burned-out
Christmas lights and broken ornaments, Halloween
costumes that haven’t been worn in years. People collect
decorations for St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day and
the Fourth of July, she says.
We began
by pulling out everything in the holiday junk zone. I
looked at every item and asked myself if I really wanted
to hold on to it. Ornaments that I had not looked at in
six years were immediately set aside to donate. We
thought assisted-living centers would be a good drop-off
prospect. But only the Goodwill in Northern Virginia
would take them, and a representative told Caitlin that
usually they accept only current seasonal items.
Among
the junk in my attic was a bag full of wrapping-paper
scraps. No single scrap was large enough to cover much
more than a jewelry box, yet there were at least two
dozen small pieces there. Caitlin eased my guilt by
encouraging me to throw them out.
Bob puts
the lights on the tree each year, and he has a good
system for rewrapping them and fitting them neatly in a
box. Caitlin saw no reason to mess with that, or with
the green box that is just the right size to store my
wiry silver-star tree-topper. Usually she tells clients
to wrap each strand of lights around a hand and put it
in a gallon-size plastic bag. She does not recommend any
kind of customized light organizer; because she says
they are completely unnecessary.
She also
was kind enough not to say anything when I insisted on
keeping the snowman cookie jar my cousin handed down to
me this year. Tacky, I know, but my two young children,
Margaret and Charlie, went crazy for it, just as her two
kids had 15 years earlier.
In the
end, Caitlin and I accumulated three bags of trash,
filled mostly with broken ornaments and ornament boxes
from the 1960s and ’70s. A few days later, I went to the
Container Store and bought two plastic-storage boxes
(large, small) and an upright wrapping-paper holder. In
one plastic box I consolidated gift bags, bows, ribbons
and gift tags. In the other, bigger, box, I fit
decorations for every other holiday of the year: Easter
baskets, Halloween candy bags, and leftover Valentine’s
Day cards that Margaret and Charlie can give to their
preschool friends next year.
I cannot
believe how nicely we consolidated everything. I feel as
if I could actually have the holidays under control this
year. Now, there’s something to celebrate!
***
Liz
Seymour, deputy editor of The Washington Post
Home section, grew up in a four-room apartment in
Brooklyn with two very organized parents and almost no
closet space. Now she lives in a center-hall Colonial in
Washington, D.C.’s American University Park neighborhood
with her husband, Bob, children Margaret and Charlie,
and one appallingly overstuffed attic.
Next
week: The Book Problem |
