A professional organizer sounds off about family portraits

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I come from a family that would get a family portrait just about every year by a professional photographer.   A few of them were in matching outfits and some of them were in very nice natural settings.  I give a lot of credit to that photographer and his wife for their skill in wrangling smiles out of all seven of us kids all at once.

My dad would order a large 2’ x 2’ photo print of our family each year to put on the wall in the hall leading down to the master bedroom.  (Okay, I don’t know the actual dimensions, but I know they were large.)  The older we got, the more fun it was to meander down the hall and look at all the family pictures to see how we had changed over time.  When we brought dates home, they were similarly enthralled with the picture wall.

Cut to one year ago when I’m helping my mom go through all her parents’ belongings at her parents’ house to try to decide what to keep.  Her mother (Barbara) is still alive, but now staying with my mom, across the country from Barbara’s house.  Gma Barbara can’t care for her house anymore and will likely never return to it.  In the process of looking for letters, important documents, home movies, photo albums, journals, and so on, my mother finds a large framed black-and-white portrait photograph of her grandfather (my great-grandfather McKnight).  It’s 2’ x 1.5’.  She decides to keep it. 

So my professional organizer mind started thinking about this picture of my GGpa McKnight and I realized what a hassle large family portraits can become over time.  Is GGpa McKnight’s portrait something my mom wants to hang on the wall, or is his picture going to go in a box somewhere?  And if on the wall, why such a large portrait for only one man?  Where is the rest of the family?  From a family history perspective, you want a portrait in a small form so you can copy and share it.  Large portraits in frames make it hard to do that if they are larger than a normal-sized flatbed scanner.

Then I started thinking about all the large family portraits on the picture wall.  What happens to them when my parents die?  They will probably be split among my siblings and I.  But let’s face it; it’s going to be hard for us to choose our favorite picture.   And do I imagine that we’ll settle perfectly on our own choice without some squabbling?  No, it will be a difficult negotiation process.  Looking through the sequence makes them all the more interesting, so I imagine that deep down we’d all like a copy of all the pictures, but none of us will have room at home for them all.   In this kind of situation, family portraits become much more useful if they can be shrunk down to 8’’ x 10” size and put in page protectors in a family history binder or photo album.

This is when I realized that if family portraits had been printed that size (or smaller) in the first place, we would not have this issue to begin with.  

I have clients who store a stack of large framed family portraits of older generations or divorced family because there is no room to hang them on the wall or they are from too long ago, but they can’t get rid of them because it is family history and they can’t find any smaller way to store them.

So here’s my opinion of large framed family portraits:

·      They’re a waste of space

·      They make it hard to pass family pictures on to the next generation because of the difficulty of storing them and sharing them.

·      They’re too big to scan in a normal scanner

In contrast, 8” x 10” family pictures are ideal.

·      They are big enough to frame and put on a wall.

·      They are small enough for the next generation to remove from the frame and put in a scrapbook.

·      They are small enough to put in a flatbed scanner, digitize, and share widely.

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

Queen Victoria's problem with hoarding

I’ve just been reading Queen Victoria: The Definitive Biography of England’s Famous Ruler by Lytton Strachey, and I found some interesting details about Queen Victoria in her later life.  It seems that she became somewhat of a hoarder.  I quote:

…Victoria was a woman not only of vast property but of innumerable possessions.  She had inherited an immense quantity of furniture, of ornaments, of china, of plate, of valuable objects of every kind; her purchases, throughout a long life, made a formidable addition to these stores; and there flowed in upon her, besides, from every quarter of the globe, a constant stream of gifts.  Over this enormous mass she exercised an unceasing and minute supervision, and the arrangement and the contemplation of it, in all its details, filled her with an intimate satisfaction.  The collecting instinct has its roots in the very depths of human nature; and, in the case of Victoria, it seemed to owe its force to two of her dominating impulses—the intense sense, which had always been hers, of her own personality, and the craving which, growing with the years, had become in her old age almost an obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for the setting up of palpable barriers against the outrages of change and time.  When she considered the multitudinous objects which belonged to her, or, better still, when, choosing out some section of them as the fancy took her, she actually savoured the vivid richness of their individual qualities, she saw herself deliciously reflected from a million facets, felt herself magnified miraculously over a boundless area, and was well pleased.  That was just as it should be; but then came the dismaying thought—everything slips away, crumbles, vanishes; Sevres dinner-services get broken; even golden basins go unaccountably astray; even one’s self, with all the recollections and experiences that make up one’s being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves…But no!  It could not, should not be so!  There should be no changes and no losses!  Nothing should ever move—neither the past nor the present—and she herself least of all!  And so the tenacious woman, hoarding her valuables, decreed their immortality with all the resolution of her soul.  She would not lose one memory or one pin.

She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away—and nothing was. There, in drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the dresses of seventy years.  But not only dresses—the furs and the mantles and subsidiary frills and the muffs and the parasols and the bonnets—all were ranged in chronological order, dated and complete.  A great cupboard was devoted to the dolls; in the china room at Windsor a special table held the mugs of her childhood, and her children’s mugs as well.  Mementos of the past surrounded her in serried accumulations.  In every room the tables were powdered thick with the photographs of relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all ages, covered the walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from pedestals, or gleamed from brackets in the form of gold and silver statuettes.  The dead, in every shape—in miniatures, in porcelain, in enormous life-size oil-paintings—were perpetually about her.  John Brown stood upon her writing table in solid gold.  Her favorite horses and dogs, endowed with a new durability, crowded round her footsteps.  Sharp in silver gilt, dominated the dinner table; Boy and Boz lay together among unfading flowers, in bronze. And it was not enough that each particle of the past should be given the stability of metal or of marble: the whole collection, in its arrangement, no less than its entity, should be immutably fixed. There might be additions, but there might never be alterations.  No chintz might change, no carpet, no curtain, be replaced by another; or, if long use at last made it necessary, the stuffs and the patterns must be so identically reproduced that the keenest eye might not detect the difference.  No new picture could be hung upon the walls of Windsor, for those already there had been put in their places by Albert, whose decisions were eternal.  So, indeed, were Victoria’s.  To ensure that they should be the aid of the camera was called in.  Every single article in the Queen’s possession was photographed from several points of view.  These photographs were submitted to Her Majesty, and when, after careful inspection, she had approved of them, they were placed in a series of albums, richly bound.  Then, opposite each photograph, an entry was made, indicating the number of the article, the number of the room in which it was kept, its exact position in the room and all its principal characteristics.  The fate of every object which had undergone this process was henceforth irrevocably sealed.  The whole multitude, once and for all, took up its steadfast station.  And Victoria, with a gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always beside her, to look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could feel, with a double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world had been arrested by the amplitude of her might.

Thus the collection, ever multiplying, ever encroaching upon new fields of consciousness, ever rooting itself more firmly in the depths of instinct, became one of the dominating influences of that strange existence.  It was a collection not merely of things and of thoughts, but of states of mind and ways of living as well.”  (Lytton Strachey.  Queen Victoria: The Definitive Biography of England’s famous ruler.  Harcourt Brace & Co.  New York.  1921.  p298-301)

With plenty of servants and money, Queen Victoria certainly could afford to keep whatever she wanted.  She didn’t have to care for any of it.  But in spite of that, her stuff still became a “dominating influence.”  In short, even Queen Victoria became enslaved by her stuff.  This is quite ironic because her biography shows in other places how determined Victoria was not to be dominated by anybody. 

“When she considered the multitudinous objects which belonged to her, or, better still, when, choosing out some section of them as the fancy took her, she actually savoured the vivid richness of their individual qualities, she saw herself deliciously reflected from a million facets, felt herself magnified miraculously over a boundless area, and was well pleased”  -- Queen Victoria seems to have adopted the idea that the vast amount of her possessions symbolized her power, and that all the different characteristics of them symbolized her personality.   This is not a good perspective to have because any loss of possessions would then symbolize to her a loss of her power and a loss of her personality.   But really, she wouldn’t have been any less powerful or have less personality if all her possessions were to go up in flames. 

“No chintz might change, no carpet, no curtain, be replaced by another; or, if long use at last made it necessary, the stuffs and the patterns must be so identically reproduced that the keenest eye might not detect the difference.” – How boring!  Getting something different when the old wears out is what makes it not so sad to have things wear out!  It’s like a lack of faith that something different can ever be as wonderful as the familiar.

I have written before about how journaling is a helpful method for de-cluttering.  Elsewhere in her biography it was pointed out how careful a journaler Queen Victoria was.  And yet, she didn’t realize how journaling could keep her memories fresh without having to actually keep the objects that triggered those memories.  One technique that professional organizers recommend is for people to take pictures of their sentimental objects and then let those objects go.  Queen Victoria had pictures taken of all her gifts and possessions and still kept them, which defeated the purpose of taking the pictures in the first place. 

When I think about Queen Victoria’s situation, I can’t help but see how hard it would have been for her to escape the slavery to her possessions.  First of all, she was the queen, and it would be difficult for anyone in awe of royalty to tell a queen that she needed to de-clutter.  Second, she was a very determined and stubborn woman.  Third, with all her resources, it would be difficult to make a clear case that she was being hurt by all her accumulation, as she had servants to clean or store or move or catalog her stuff and she had the money to make more places to store it.  Fourth, with all the valuable gifts that poured in and all the objects triggering memories, the task of making decisions about what was most important and most valuable to her would be made harder.  (I don’t think it would be impossible, but I think it would be harder.)  I really pity the next in line to the throne who had to deal with all that stuff.

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

De-cluttering journals

When a loved one dies, their journals are a priceless artifact that allows their memory to live on.  However, there are different difficulties that can crop up in deciding who gets to keep the journals. 

If there is only one journal and more than one person who is interested in having it, the best method would be to hire someone to type up the journal so that others can have copies. 

If the departed was a prolific journal-writer, the solution can be as simple as dividing the journal volumes up among those interested, however, a new problem also arises: no one person has a copy of the whole story.  There are several solutions for this:

·      Someone could read through all the journals and create a condensed life narrative incorporating the most important events in the life of the deceased so that everyone can get a bird’s eye view.  (Huge project!) 

·      Another solution would be to create a blog that is accessible only to the family, to type of the journals, and upload them onto the blog so that everyone in the family can read them. (Also a huge project!)

·      Another solution might be for each party that has a journal to type up a condensed version of the important events in the journal they have and then compile those summaries together with the others to share with each person. 

·      Another solution might be to ask everyone to pass their journal on to the next person who has a journal so that eventually everyone can read the whole story.  Perhaps a schedule can be made of when to pass the journal on.

I went looking online to see what other people thought about de-cluttering journals and it turns out there is a wide segment of the population that has journalled faithfully through their life and would be “absolutely mortified” if anyone else read what they wrote from their teens and twenties.  (Yes, “absolutely mortified” is the phrase that is universally used.)  Evidently this wide segment of the population has used their journals mostly as a place to vent their anger and frustration and as a place to record the lurid details of their love lives.

So, if you are one of these people, you may wonder how to deal with your journals.  

1. Try looking at your journal as if from the perspective of your great-great-grandson or great-great-granddaughter who knows nothing of you personally except what they’ve been told by their parents or grandparents.  Try looking at it from the perspective of someone who views your present as the distant past and who wonders what it was like to live in “that age.” 

2. For the sake of this distant person, try to select the best things from your journal that you can isolate from the dross and pass on.

3. Read through your journals with a highlighter and outline all the sections that you feel are worth keeping.  If you have more good than bad, tear out the bad or scribble over it with a heavy black marker and tape paper over it.  If you have very little that is good, tear out the good sections to keep and burn the rest of the journal. 

4. Consider producing an “edited” version of your journal.  Feel free to cross things out and write in the margins telling how you look back on this and realize how you wish you had acted or reacted differently and why.  Share what lessons you learned from the experience.  Your experience is not wasted if it helps someone else keep from making the same mistakes you did.

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

De-cluttering method: journaling

(http://www.writingforward.com/journal_writing/journal-writing/writing-journal-made-a-writer-of-me)

Often when I help people organize and de-clutter, when we get to objects of sentimental value that trigger memories, they begin telling me stories.  I tell them they need to validate their emotions and record their memories in their journal, but they don't seem to get that bit of advice. 

Journals are one of the best de-cluttering devices ever invented.  A journal is the place to get rid of all the mental clutter, like the wonderful things that happen to you that you don’t want to forget but are afraid you will.  A journal is the place to vent about the terrible, obnoxious things that people did to you so you can get it off your chest. 

Journals are the place to tell stories about what you used to do with your siblings when you were growing up so that you don’t have to keep old toys to remind you of the same thing. 

Journals are the place to tell about amazing places you went for vacation and what you did so that you don’t have to buy souvenirs.  When I was a teenager, I got into keeping a vacation log for each family vacation we took.  I carried it around with me and described what my whole family was doing at crazy moments.  That vacation log is the best souvenir I have (and actually my only souvenir).  It is the only souvenir I really need because when I read it, I can relive the vacation.

Journals are really useful as a tool for de-cluttering stuff that represents a relationship with a loved one.   Journals help you let go of stuff like the following:

·      The seashell necklace made of colored yarn given to you by your daughter twelve years ago.

·      The scraggly crayon drawing of you and your family produced by your son when he was three.

·      The construction paper Christmas ornament made by your daughter in kindergarten that sheds glitter everywhere.

·      The ugly vase given to you as a wedding gift by your favorite aunt.

·      The baby clothes worn by all your children. 

·      The toys you and your siblings used to play with as a kid but never touch now.

In a journal, you can write about the symbolism of that object, the person it evokes memories of, the happy times spent together, and everything else about it that seems to demand respect.  Journaling validates the emotions and preserves the memories for the future.  Those memories are more important than the object itself.  Without the memories, the object would cease to have any hold over us.  Journaling preserves the memories separate from the object, thereby making it unnecessary to keep the object.

I recently read through the book The 100 Thing Challenge, by Dave Bruno in which he pared down his stuff to 100 things and lived with 100 things for a whole year.  One of the great things about his book was that he recorded his feelings and emotions that were attached to the stuff that he was getting rid of.   He got rid of some fairly expensive items—carpenter tools, sports equipment, and antique train sets, for example.  He wrote about why he had bought them, what they symbolized to him, the values he had been trying to incorporate into his life by buying them, etc.  I know he wrote his book after having completed his challenge, but writing about the things he got rid of was probably very therapeutic.  I think this book is helpful for anyone who wants to see how journaling can help loosen emotional attachment.  It is also a great help if you want to see an example of reasoning about what is needed and what isn’t.  (We learn from examples, and examples of de-cluttering reasoning help us build our own skills and learn to make wise decisions.)

I personally have used journalling to help me let go of some jewelry from an old boyfriend and a sunflower blanket I bought myself when I was a teen.

One of the things that might keep you from using a journal to de-clutter is when you have so much stuff to write about.  The more stuff you have to write about, the more overwhelming it is.  Another way you could do it faster would be to record yourself as you share the memories and meaning you have associated with those things.  You can record audio or you can use video. 

 

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

De-cluttering the guilt-ridden stuff

One of the things that makes it hard for many people to de-clutter is emotional attachment and sentiment. It is hard to get rid of things that trigger positive emotions and pleasant memories.

But there’s another kind of emotional attachment to our stuff that we may develop, almost in spite ourselves. This brand of attachment is negative and it is associated with guilt. A lot of times it is associated with bad gifts we receive from good friends and beloved family. Other times it may be clothes that we haven’t fit in years and we are keeping them to motivate ourselves to lose weight. Or it may be misguided purchases that wasted our money and we just can’t bear to let go because it cost so much. It may be associated with craft projects we never finished.

The best way to overcome guilt is with forgiveness. This means we must practice forgiving ourselves. Here are some examples.

A few Christmases ago, my mother-in-law asked me what I wanted her to get me and I told her I wanted crystal. I was thinking of modifying my dining room light and making it into a sort of crystal chandelier with strings of crystals dripping from it. When I said “crystal”, I had “strings of little crystals” in mind. My mother-in-law interpreted “crystal” to mean “little crystal statue” and sent me a crystal swan. Not only was I disappointed (yes, sorry Leann, nothing personal!),  but I felt guilty for being disappointed, because I realized it was my fault for not being more specific. I didn’t want a crystal swan, because I don't care for knick-knacks, but I felt compelled to keep the swan, because.. well.. because it was beautiful, and my mother-in-law gave it to me, and I love my mother-in-law. Eventually, though, I realized just how silly it was to keep something I didn’t like simply out of guilt. I forgave myself for giving such unspecific directions, and since part of forgiving is forgetting about it, I made sure I’d forget by donating the swan to a thrift store. Because I won’t see it, I won’t remember it.

One thing that might deter us from giving away bad gifts is the fear that our relatives will ask us, “What did you think of the _____ I sent you?” We fear that our desire to please our relatives will overcome our desire to be truthful and that we will have to lie and say it was fabulous when we thought it was horrifically ugly. We all want to be able to please our relatives and say we loved the gift, but if we really don’t, first, we can’t lie with believable enthusiasm, and secondly, we are diluting our ability to express our true appreciation for future good gifts. What’s the worst that can happen if we say, “I thought someone else would enjoy it better than I could, so I gave it away.”? At worst you could mortally offend a rich relative and be cut out of their will. (But that’s still not so bad, because you don’t miss what you never had in the first place.) And what if that gift giver consistently gives terrible gifts? Then it might be to your advantage to be frank so that they will stop giving you gifts. If they are good at giving gifts, it would be to your advantage to be truthful and even help them out with suggestions for good gifts, because it will help them know better what you would like.  Don't expect them to be a mind-reader or a champion guesser.

What about the clothes we keep which we used to fit into and don’t any more? Of course, we keep them because we intend to lose weight some day so that we can fit them again. However, we forget that during the weighty years those clothes we hang onto go out of style, especially the more extreme styles, so even if we did lose weight, we would need a new wardrobe anyway. It is best to forgive yourself for not having lost weight earlier, and get rid of the old, small clothes so you can forget about how long they’ve been sitting under your bed. Then, after you’ve lost weight, rather than thinking you are merely an older version of the thin you once were, it will seem like you’re a new, thinner you.

Another guilt-attachment we may have to our stuff is when we’ve made misguided purchases that wasted our money and we just can’t bear to let go because it cost so much. We have to remember that though there is the money that we paid for it that is being wasted, the longer we keep that something, the more money we waste paying rent on the space it takes up. Forgive yourself for your bad purchase. Getting rid of it both cuts your losses, and allows you to forget about it.

Some may think that it is important to keep those things around in order to remind yourself not to make stupid purchases, but anyone able to learn from their mistakes will naturally become a wiser, more cautious buyer. A wiser buyer doesn’t need reminders of their past stupidity hanging around in order to buy wisely. If anything, hanging on to those purchases has the effect of sapping confidence in one’s self.

What about the craft projects we never finished? Keeping around old, unfinished craft projects not only causes guilt, but it discourages us from getting involved in better, more exciting craft projects. “I can’t do that, because I have a million un-finished things at home.” This locks us into a cycle of “I didn’t finish” guilt and “I can’t do what I want to do” loss and frustration. If the craft projects go unfinished, it is because other things are a higher priority. If you honestly think that there will never come a time when you will be interested enough to finish that cross stitch, then it is time to forgive yourself for not finishing it. Get rid of it so that you can forget about it and be free to get involved in projects that are really important to you. (And don’t feel you are obligated to finish the unfinished craft projects of your dearly departed relatives.) I was finally able to get rid of an old knitting project I had stalled on years ago.

After we do this, it is important to remember that just because that thing seems to define us, it doesn’t mean that it is us. If we get rid of it, we are not getting rid of a physical part of our bodies. We can live and breathe and eat and sleep without that thing. Rather than saying our stuff defines who we are, it would be better to say that it is more an extension of our personality, or an expression of our personality. But even this view is mostly based upon our materialistic culture of “self-expression through possession”. We easily forget that our culture is also based upon freedom of speech, and because of that, the most dynamic and meaningful outlet of self-expression is our words and our deeds. In this way, we can realize that our words and deeds define who we are far better than what we own. (This is a “dangerous” doctrine; it implies a rich person and a poor person define themselves equally well.)

Looking at it this way, we can see that our stuff can define our present personality or our past personality. But to hang on to old stuff seems to be looking backward instead of forward. We need to realize that when we can let go of the things that defined us in the past, we will have room for the future things that come along that define us in the future. It takes real confidence in the future that there are better things waiting for us in the future.

Dealing with de-cluttering fear

I ran across the Blog “Be More with Less” with the post “Busting Your Biggest Clutter Fears” and thought I would give my take on some of the fears discussed and add a few tips of my own. So.. what are your biggest clutter fears?

I’m afraid I’ll have to buy it again

Are you one of those people who are reluctant to get rid of things you don’t use because you are afraid you’ll only have to buy it again later?

The best way to overcome this fear is to think about how many times you have used it so far, and then make a projection based upon how you live your life now how much you will have occasion to use it in the future. If you live life in the future very much like you live life today, what are the chances that you will use this object?

One of the mistakes we often make is to think that we HAVE to own and keep everything we use, even if we only used it once. A better way is to own and keep things that we have a very high probability of needing and using OFTEN.

Let me give you an example. I bought a crowbar a few months ago because I thought I was going to need to use it to change out some cement tiles on my roof. In the end, I didn’t really need to use it because a fellow from my church was kind enough to do the job for me. Yet I have been hanging on to the crowbar out of worry that if I let go of it, I will only need to buy it again later.

Yet, if I try to determine the probability of me having a need to use the crowbar, I find that I shouldn’t worry about it. Crowbars are used for prying things. Our house is pretty nice the way it is and I don’t have any project that I’d need a crowbar for. Neither I or my husband are into carpentry. The claw on our claw hammer is a pretty good tool for prying if we ever need it. If life continues as it is into the future for at least ten years, the probability of an occasion to use the crowbar is very very low. Probably near .25%. I can now put the crowbar in our discard box.

I’m afraid my stuff won’t go to the right place.

Let’s put this fear in perspective. When a young girl puts her newborn baby up for adoption, she would be justified in her concern that her baby will go to the right place. In comparison to this, inanimate objects deserve much less worry.

It is good to put some effort into making sure the stuff that you get rid of goes to the right place, but you have to know where to draw the line. Too much concern for everything means that the burden of de-cluttering anything becomes prohibitively heavy.

One of the fastest, easiest methods of getting your stuff to the “right place” is to drop it off at the donation center of the nearest thrift store. The economic value of thrift stores is that they are an aggregation of many different types of objects that would be difficult to find homes for individually. They are a place that many people can come and pick out what they want and like. There is a higher probability that your precious whatsit will find a buyer there than if you were to take all your time and ask all your friends if they need it. The advantage to you is that while your whatsit is waiting for a buyer, it is not taking up space in your house any more, and you get a tax deduction for a charitable contribution.

Your main two concerns should be getting lightly used articles to a place where they can be used, and getting recyclables where they should go. But some stuff is going to have to go to the landfill. Accept that you’ve done your best and let go.

I’m afraid I won’t have anything left to give my children.

The best thing besides your love and attention that you can give your children is to keep a journal. Journals are like a piece of yourself; they communicate all the stories and memories you choose to record. When you are gone from the earth, your children will appreciate having your journals the most, perhaps even more than having many photos of you.

I’m afraid that if I let go of something sentimental, I’ll forget the memory.

Many organizing professionals advocate taking a picture of your sentimental items. My problem with this advice is that it doesn’t fully seem to deal with the difficulty. The difficulty is caused because there are good memories and feelings associated with the item and those feelings have to be honored and validated in a way that is as satisfying and long-lasting as keeping the item would be.

A better way to honor those memories is to write about them in a journal. By writing about the feelings, they are preserved for the future. The triumphs, dreams, and all the pleasant feelings can be communicated to others, which is part of the fun of remembering.

“I’m afraid that I wasted money on things and giving stuff away is like money down the drain.”

Time to confront that fear…ask yourself: how much money are you going to have to pay to get rid of your stuff? If the answer is what I think it is, you don’t have to pay anything. If you have to pay to let go, only then can you really say that giving stuff away is “money down the drain.”

If you are have a sneaking suspicion that you wasted your money on buying something, it isn’t going to do you any good to hang on to it. Repent and get rid of it! Confess that you have wasted your money, and then resolve that you will stop wasting your space. As commenter Rita@thissortaoldlife wrote on http://www.bemorewithless.com/2012/busting-your-biggest-clutter-fears/, “keeping the clothes I never wore would not get me the money back or justify the expenitures—and once the truth of their value (not much) was seen, I could not un-see it. Getting rid of them did remove the constant-visual reminder of the choices I regretted. It was much easier to move on and leave them in the past…”

If I let go of ______, someone in my family will be mad.

Is it your stuff or their stuff? If they have given it to you, then YOU are the one who gets to choose what to do with it, not them. If you are worried about them getting mad at you if you get rid of it, ask them if they want it. If they don’t want it, then you can get rid of it without fear. If they get mad after that, remind them that you have a right to do what you want with the stuff that belongs to you and remind them that you offered it to them beforehand.

Dealing with memorabilia--letters and cards

I just got done with a week of helping my mom search through her mom’s stuff to try to find journals, photos, movies, letters, important documents, and genealogical information. Let me tell you, it was a marathon week. It is one thing to find all of that stuff, and it is quite another to try to pare down the mass of it into something that is the MOST IMPORTANT.

The challenge becomes all the more arduous when the people whose stuff you are looking through were in the habit of keeping every letter, every greeting card, every picture. That was the case with my grandmother and grandfather. One thing that made it challenging to deal with was that all these letters and cards and other documents were not all kept in the same place. We kept finding caches of them—every dresser drawer seemed to have a little stash of letters and cards at the bottom of it. We found cards in among the knitting projects. We found cards and letters among the paint brushes. It began to seem like we’d have to look everywhere to make sure that we got them all. The first step in dealing with it was to consolidate all those caches into one place.

Then came the job of sorting through those cards and letters. Everyone has dreams of discovering a stash of their parents or grandparents love letters tied with an old ribbon, right? But what if you also discover letters from parents, letters from children, letters from siblings, letters from neighbors, and more? You can’t keep it all, and frankly, you shouldn’t keep it all.

But this raises the question—if you shouldn’t keep it all, how do you distinguish between what you should and shouldn’t keep, and what do you do with what you decide to not keep? How do you get rid of it in a way that still honors the people who sent the letters in the first place?

In the process of examining all that memorabilia, I was able to find some answers to those questions because of what I observed.

One of the best ways to help whittle down a card collection or a bunch of letters is to view them from the eyes of your descendants 4 generations in the future. Think about the kind of information they would want to know about and then look to see if that kind of information can be found in the letters or cards. How helpful are the cards and letters doing their job to communicate important information about names, dates, places of family history or character traits?

Observation #1: When people send greeting cards, they tend to not write much in them. 95% of the greeting cards we went through only had signatures. If you place a priority on keeping memorabilia with real meaning conveyed by the sender, greeting cards usually are meaningless. The way I began to see it, if the greeting card sender really cared that much about the message they wanted to convey, they would not have sent a greeting card to speak for them; they would have worked to find the words to say it themselves. It is the words written by the sender, not the words written by the greeting card publisher that have real, lasting meaning.

(Now, I know there are those who will argue that if a card is really pretty, it should be kept, but when you are dealing with a large stash of cards and letters, you need to be RUTHLESS and look for every excuse you can to get rid of the cards, otherwise you will end up burdened with Other People’s Stuff (hereafter referred to as OPS).)

So, the first step is to go through the entire pile quickly and get rid of all the greeting cards that have nothing written in them besides a signature.

Observation #2: Letters tend to share much more information about the person who sent the letter than the person who received the letter. (Love letters are an exception to this.) Because of this, letters tend to be more valuable to the sender as family history documents than to the receiver.

The second step is to sort all the remaining letters into piles according to who sent the letter or the card. That way, you’ll have all the letters from mom in one pile, all the letters from each sibling in its own pile, all the letters from friends in their own pile.

When all the piles are sorted by sender, get some manila envelopes and mail each pile to the sender if they are still living. Hopefully the letters will still have addressed envelopes, and you can tell by the postmark on the envelopes which return address is the most recent. Letters usually include little slices of history from the life of the sender, so when the sender gets a pile of letters back that they once sent, they get two benefits:

-They get the pleasure of knowing that their letters were important/interesting enough to be saved

-They get the pleasure of rereading what they wrote in the past. It can trigger pleasant memories. Put in order, those letters can even do the job of a personal journal, if they hadn’t kept one before.

In the case of my grandmother, she had letters from her sisters and her brothers and her mother. We can mail back the letters from her sisters and brothers because not only will it help them remember and preserve their own family history, but their descendants will have a chance to read through those letters someday and learn about them.

As for the letters to my grandmother from her mother, those were valuable to us because they were in our direct line of relationship.

Now, many people might stop here, but this doesn’t have to be the end of the process of evaluation. Whether you go further depends on the amount of correspondence and the amount of other memorabilia available to establish important family history facts.

If there is a lot of family history material to go through, it is important to find the best items to establish the important family history facts. You don’t have keep everything that establishes a fact, just the best things. Letters are very important if they are the only source for family history, but if other sources such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, etc., exist, then letters are better for conveying slices of life.

If there are a lot of letters that convey slices of life and other documents establish family history data, then you should not feel obligated to keep all those letters. Rather, you have a license to read through those letters and choose according to your own criteria which ones are best representative of the qualities that you want to remember about the sender. Are there any that display wit and humor? Are there any that display courage in the face of difficulty? Are there any that display a certain originality of thought or expression? Is any special devotion communicated? Don’t be afraid to use sticky notes to mark parts that especially please you as you read through. At the end of reading through the pile of letters, you will be able to see at a glance by how many sticky notes are applied which letters are most worth keeping. This will aid in making decisions about the relative value of each letter.

Extra credit: If you have old family letters that you want to make available to more people to read, consider setting up a blog devoted to your family history. You can scan the letters inherited or found and then post the images of them on the blog, along with careful explanations that will allow a viewer to understand them. This method of sharing is most effective if you have already whittled down the collection to the most important and significant letters. (Word of caution: Avoid embarrassing the living.)

What to do with greeting cards?

Sometimes it is hard to figure out what to do with greeting cards if you tend to get sentimental.

When I got married, everyone who gave me a wedding gift also included a greeting card. Some of them were really pretty. And of course, I was just plain starry-eyed about my wedding and so I wanted to save things that reminded me of that special time.

How did I deal with all those greeting cards? It took time--at least a year. I went through several stages, and I did different things with the cards at each stage.

Stage #1 For the first six months after my wedding, I wanted to keep ALL the greeting cards. So I did. And, to make sure that I continued to appreciate them, I taped them all up on the wall of our study in a big greeting-card-collage. I thought of it as our “wedding shrine.”

Eventually I got to the point when the greeting cards weren’t giving me the same happy emotional jolt of remembering my wedding as they first did. (I realized this wasn’t because anything was wrong with me, it was just that I had emotionally moved on to other things, like our actual marriage.) So, it was time to get a little more selective.

Stage #2. I decided I would take down any cards that didn’t fill at least one of the following criteria:

• They had to be pretty. Like knock-your-socks-off pretty.
• They had to have something meaningfully personal written to us. (“Meaningful” being defined as something that would not also apply to any other newly wedded couple.)

Cards that I took down were sufficiently boring to me by that time that I was able to just put them in the recycling bin without a pang.

Stage #3. After another few months, I was ready to decorate some other way, so I took down those greeting cards, recycled the pretty ones, and put the meaningful ones in a box. This reduced the stack substantially.

Stage #4. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what happened at stage 4, but I have a vague idea that I decided to recycle all the rest of the greeting cards. Knowing me, I told myself that I probably wouldn’t read them over again and I wanted the space to be free for other things. The shrine stage (stage 1) had already validated my sentimentality all that I needed.

So that’s how I dealt with the highly emotionally charged wedding day greeting cards. It’s about giving yourself time to savor them by display, and then getting more selective when you start to take them for granted.

How about letters from friends and family?

About a year ago, I went through a box of letters that I saved from back in high school from old friends. (Ahh, the good old days when people still wrote letters and put them in the mail!) I read through them all and looked for the extra witty or interesting ones to keep. Then I tossed the others.

The blog Small Notebook in the post “Organize greeting cards: the stack method” has some good suggestions for how to deal with greeting cards:

Once you’ve built up a stack, separate them into little piles according to who gave them to you. It’s easier to throw away a few Easter cards from your granny when you can see that you have six of them, and then you can pick your favorite.

Save the cards from the people who are closest to you, not every acquaintance who ever sent you a thank you note.

Image: http://enjoylifeandlove.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-card-saver.html