RING IN THE NEW YEAR—WITHOUT BECOMING A BASKET CASE

January 10, 2015

The fireworks are over, the holidays done. Some of us have even packed away the evidence and put away the decorations. In our household, it’s a delicate balance as my husband would leave everything up until beach weather hits.

In fact, the festive season begins before Thanksgiving and can continue until the Yuletide, in early January or Candlemas in early February, if you follow Christian traditions.

The point is, however, that whatever your religious and cultural traditions might be, here in North America the big mental transition from one year to the next occurs on New Years Eve. Once that is done, it can seem like the fun is done and the hard work begins.

The entire tradition of making resolutions can be daunting and even discouraging, especially when the weather can be so bleak that all you want to do is to stay in bed

What can you do to be kind to yourself?

on weekends, for those of you without children or weekend jobs, sleep until you wake up naturally to help your body get vital rest
get 20 minutes of sunshine a day by going outside or sitting near a window. Even a bright artificial light makes a difference.
Try to get some exercise every day, even if it means going up and down the stairs at work for 10 minutes. Raising your heart rate helps.
Treat yourself to some pampering: take a bath, drink hot tea, read a book or give someone a hug. The joy of the hug is that you immediately get back what you give. I make time to say hello to an elderly neighbor who lives alone – and who told me once that now her kids have left home she never gets any affection. The delight on her face when I hug her is a gift for both of us.

What does all of this have to do with your home? Well, it’s the place where we rest and recuperate. It’s the place where we celebrate. The place where we spend so much of our time when, as the song says, “the weather outside is frightful.” I am not quite sure why, for me, that means time to organize and purge. I don’t Spring Clean. In the spring, I just want to go out and play. I winter clean.

I start small: sometimes I simply clean out the bathroom cabinet. Sometimes I will take an entire weekend to do an entire room – or my wardrobe. The key is to have a box for recycling, lots of garbage bags and, most important, a box for “deal with it later” items as those seem to be the ones that can stall the whole process the fastest.

Label your boxes before you begin to help make your organizing go faster.

If you feel ambitious, go for it. One of my girlfriends claims that her best trick for getting the job done is to “bribe” herself with a series of new baskets. She uses them to store the items that survive the declutter process. At kouboo.com they have a storage stool and an open basket that are so gorgeous they would not only take care of clutter but turn it into something beautiful to look at:

The storage stool: