Winter fills the house with STUFF.  Some of it necessary, some frivolous.

It’s 5 degrees outside, and indoors, A and C wreak havoc through the rooms, strewing toys and clothes everywhere.  They sneak into every closet, drag out their summer sundresses and bags of old STUFF I’d set aside to give away.

They unroll all the wrapping paper and play with their hidden Christmas presents.

We are drowning in our possessions.  We don’t need anything more.

Come in the front door, and trip over winter boots, snowsuits, discarded hats and mittens.  Preschool artwork, blocks, trains underfoot.  Madly I try to maintain order– tidying up, recycling, throwing plastic crap away.  But entropy is the law here:  the STUFF creeps back and multiplies.

Meanwhile we make our Christmas lists:  more toys, more STUFF to cram in the house.  I vow not to get anything for my children, but it’s Christmas and I want to give them gifts.

The urge to simplify fights the impulse to give.  My girls adore STUFF, especially A.  How easy to abandon all resistance, jump into the rushing river of holiday spending and let myself be swept away.  Maybe the guilt and anxiety over our financial struggles will dissolve like so much sugar in the process.

Yeah right.

Meanwhile, an image continues to haunt me:

“Few of us can imagine ourselves involved in deranged acts of violence, but we all know how newspapers and magazines can stack up, how “collectibles” can accumulate.  It’s not much of a stretch to imagine ourselves the hapless victims of our possessions– paralyzed by things we’re unable to sort out and discard, annihilated by our affluence, crushed by our consumerism.

How else to explain our ongoing fascination with the Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, whose decaying bodies were discovered in the spring of 1947 amid more than one hundred tons of trash in their family brownstone?”

-Joyce Carol Oats, “Love and Squalor,” book review in The New Yorker, September 7, 2009

This story serves as a warning to me.  For every new thing we get, we must give or throw something away.  And when we move and downsize, as we will before long, we will get rid of even more.  The girls will adjust.  They may even be relieved.

I know I will be.

Tags:   clutter · consumerism · stuff1 Comment