Corona Cleaning - Oh Christmas Closet

January 03, 2021

One of my NY resolutions was to clean out storage areas in the house, so yesterday we attacked the "Christmas closet."

My friend Ben swears that every Saint Paul homes has one of these weird basement closets. Whether they were used for storing canned goods or torture rooms of what else who knows (it's not the coal room, the chute was in a different part of the basement). We originally used ours for wine but it did not really give a cozy, wine cellar vibe (and once we realized we were never going to go down to the basement to cozily sip vintage wines anyway), we moved the wine storage to a more accessible area and put the Christmas stuff in here, kind of higgelty-piggelty.

Add in two factors:

1. My family has a congenital box problem. Boxes *must* be stored in case they come in handy later. My grandmother even marked them helpfully as "empty." When you open a gift in my family, the box is almost never indicative of the gift.

2. My dad was a Christmas hoarder. Fully half his basement was taken up by Christmas stuff, though honestly I don't remember him making a big deal out of decorating. We have a portion of that over here, especially the wrapping stuff.

Add in 4 tips for ornaments (plus 2 wine boxes for the tree ornaments), a couple of reusable advent calendars, 2 lefse grills, Christmas dishes, and a train to go around the tree, and it was a mess.

So we attacked it yesterday, though in true form we took no pictures because it was just going to be a tiny organizational project, no big deal.

We broke down the vast majority of the boxes and filled 3 recycling cans full of them (and we still have some left). I filed 2 large trash bags wit tissue paper.

I cleaned out the "Gifts to Give" bin and winnowed it down to things I might actually give, and gave the rest away on the Buy Nothing board.

We organized all the wrapping materials.

We hung things like the wreath up, and moved things around so they made more sense. I'm pretty sure there's a ton of other Christmas stuff kicking around the rest of the basement (all the stuff you forget to put away, and then later can't get past everything stacked up in the Christmas closet, but I think this time we'll have room for it.

It looks a lot better. But we have a lot of other storage spaces to address next.