Today is a day for taking down Christmas decor.

My  husband has a vendetta against stuff.  He is always on the lookout to throw stuff away, especially my stuff.  Now his problem with stuff has latched onto my Christmas stuff.  I don't even unpack a lot of it, and he still thinks we have too much.  I will admit I'm a pack rat and tend toward being a hoarder, but when I lived by myself, I always managed to keep my clutter limited to a spot on the kitchen counter or my desk.  My office tends to be messy (the playroom part) because I don't always have to energy to put everything away after each session, but the kids don't mind.  The other clutter is confined to a box under my desk, or in file cabinet, and it is otherwise pretty orderly.

Much of my clutter...er, stuff is relegated to the guest room, because the only storage space in the house is the garage since we have no basement.  However, the garage is now my husbands workshop and office so there is effectively no storage at all.  The Christmas decor is in a small storage shed in the back yard.

This year, we have all new storage boxes, and I am pretty sure that anything that doesn't fit will be fodder for the trash, and I am worried.  Many thing have mysteriously disappeared in the past.
I had a giant blowup Godzilla that I bought for five dollars at the now defunct Cut Rate Toys (may it rest is peace).  It was a fabulous Halloween decoration.  It was probably 7 feet tall, and I am sure it was a movie theater promotional prop or something.  I had it for exactly one Halloween, and the next year it was not in any of the Halloween decoration boxes,  I am fairly certain, he went straight into the trash, with the hope that I wouldn't remember I had him at all.  How does one forget a 7 foot blow up killer Godzilla?

Eli had this fantastic set of wooden blocks in a bag.  I think they were a gift from my sister.  Now, if anything screamed "future play therapy toy" that was it.  However, during a spring cleaning of Eli's room, they were a victim of an over-zealous trash-bag-filling rampage.

I could list many times when I will say "Where is that such and such I had in this closet, or on this shelf, or in that storage bin?", only to hear, " Uhhh, I ...never touched it.".  This probably means he used tong or something to throw it away rather than his bare hands. He thinks that, because he has no memory of my stuff, that I don;t remember it either!

I trust my husband with my life, but not with my stuff.

So now, he has sort of begun to understand that, if is not his, he absolutely must ask before he tosses.

We are going to go through the  Christmas decorations.  I am going sincerely ask myself if the item has meaning, or if it is just around because it's always been in the box of Christmas items.  I am going to make a concerted effort not to smack my husband, and I am going to appreciate that he told my son that nothing gets thrown out without mom's approval.

Ahh!  Progress!

Here is my husband's website.  Watch the video to see my former garage.  http://www.danahoferbrassrepair.com/