Christmas in July and a Better Basement

Today's post begins with one from the vault (December 2015), but it's kind of a mash-up: a little bit Throwback Thursday, a little bit of a Then & Now post and a tip for digging into an overwhelming space. The original post is in italics below; today's update follows it.

When my daughter was small, we started a book tradition at our house. I can't remember where I found the idea -- it might have been Family Fun magazine -- but I do seem to remember that it was just a front-of-book snippet by a parent. "Just" a snippet turned into a tradition that, at our house, lasted until my daughter was into her teens. And when a writer friend posted the photo below on her Facebook page , it begged to be shared.

Photo from Magic 106.1 FM, Guelph, Canada
via Facebook

The process is a bit time consuming up front, but very simple. In November, gather all of your child's Christmas-themed books. Then, sometime before December 1, wrap each book individually. Beginning December 1, your child can open a book a day (or a book a week, or somewhere in between, depending upon the number of books you have available). Secretly purchasing new books I could add to the pile was fun, too, and less expensive than it would seem, as many old favorites endured for years.

My daughter loved coming downstairs each morning and opening a "new" book, and, as a bonus, it started each day with reading. Although mornings worked well for us, you could just as easily do this after dinner (or before dinner to procure some late afternoon peace and quiet), or at bedtime.

Once all of the books have been opened and the season has passed, gather them up again when you gather up the decorations and put them in a special box (labeled or unique so you can find it quickly when the time comes to do it again). If you're feeling really industrious, you can wrap a few (or all of them) before you put them away, saving yourself some time at the outset, but choose carefully. You may find that your child deems some of this year's books too babyish next year.

What does this have to do with organization? I'm glad you asked :-) It's a reminder that managing our stuff doesn't always mean getting rid of things. Sometimes, it means rotating the things we take out from season to season so we can keep and enjoy more of what we love, without creating organizational mishaps along the way.

minfl3 via Pixabay

You may be wondering why I'm posting this in July. I have two reasons. First, the idea can be easily adapted to summer. You can use summer-themed books, long-neglected former favorites, or even library books. You can use picture books, or have the next book in a series available when the previous one has been completed. Wrap them (or not) and leave them at your child's place at the table. (It might be confusing for small children if you wrap library books that need to be returned). 

While readers will likely dig into the book along with breakfast every day, reluctant readers may not, and that's okay. (You can lead a child to a book, but you can't make them read it). If they're enthusiastic about the idea, keep it going (you never know which book will be "the one"), and set aside a basket where they can easily pick the books up if and when they want to read them. At the end of the summer or when the basket is full, you and your child can decide which to keep and which to donate.

haderer17 via Pixabay

The second reason for this post has to do with a place in my house which would convince you that I have no business writing about organization, ever. That would be our basement, where all good (and some not-so-good) things go to collect dust and be ignored. On more than one occasion last week, I attempted to use Give it Five! in the most cluttered section of my basement, but I was stymied.

I had no idea where to start. Me. The Queen of "Take small steps" and "Start with Successes." Well, the successes were hidden behind piles and every step seemed like an enormous one.

The solution didn't come to me immediately but, when it did, it was so obvious.

I needed to define my small step. If starting with a random pile wasn't working, I needed to start with something specific. Based on the rest of this post, you've probably guessed what that was.

Books. 

I set a timer for an hour and dug in. If it was a book, I needed to decide whether to keep it, donate it or toss it (old textbooks were the only ones that made that pile). If I decided to keep it, I had to decide where to store it. 

If it wasn't a book, it could wait for another day.

Three hours later (once I got started, I wanted to keep going), I had three medium-sized boxes of books to donate and two similarly sized clear bins with books I wanted to keep (one reference, one children's). I'd cleared some floor space (by sorting through the bins that were there), reduced some piles, and cleaned off shelves to make the "I think I want to read this one" books easy to find. In addition, I not only know where to find the books that made the cut, I can see what's in my bins without even pulling them off the shelves. 

In the process of this de-cluttering, I came across a stack of books from the last Christmas we did the book unwrapping and yes, they were wrapped. 

Those were my daughter's to sort.

I'm actually kind of excited to tackle the basement again, sooner rather than later because now I know just where to start. I still a few books to go through, and I have another category at the ready, should I need it, but my adventures in decluttering last weekend created the momentum I need to keep chipping away at this overwhelming organizational project.

I know I always say "start anywhere," and I stand by that statement because it doesn't really matter where you start. But, when "anywhere" is as overwhelming as the task at hand, getting really specific can shine a light on the place where we can make progress.