Is a No-Gift Christmas with Kids Really Possible?

Have you ever come to dread something you once loved? Last Christmas, I realized that even though I looked forward to the cookies, the lights, the general goodwill in the air, and of course the special religious meaning for my family, I also felt an overwhelming desire to hide under the covers and not come out until January. 

The problem was my family's gift-giving, which had gotten out of hand. We were spending way too much time, effort, and money on stuff that didn't add value to our kids' lives, and on top of it all the house was always a disaster because it was too much for any of us to organize and manage. 

So we simply quit giving the kids gifts at Christmas. No more toys. No more stuff. 

How did our first no-gift Christmas go? Would we do it again? And would it ever in a million years work in your family? 

Here's everything you ever wanted to know about going gift-free this Christmas, but were afraid to ask.

Q: What did your Christmases look like before?

We used to get each kid four presents, plus one from Santa. That doesn't sound excessive, but with 6 kids it quickly added up, and when you added in extra toys and gadgets from extended family members it was way too much. 

I know it's a privilege being able to complain about having too much stuff, but it certainly doesn't feel like a privilege when you're drowning in it.

Q: What does a no-gift Christmas look like?

A: Each child gets one experience gift from us, and that's it. The only tangible items they receive are a stocking filled by Santa, one physical gift from Santa, and whatever their grandparents choose to get them.

Q: Were the kids actually on board with this?

A: We started by having a family meeting. We explained to the kids we wanted to avoid waste and focus on doing stuff together instead of giving stuff. At first they were skeptical (especially the younger ones,) but once they started making lists of fun places they've always wanted to go they got excited about it.

Q: Wait a minute. Wasn't Christmas Day super-lame without gifts to open?

Well, they still have a few gifts to unwrap from Santa and their grandparents. But aside from that, we tried to make the experience of opening the experience gifts fun by printing out a certificate for each experience and packaging it creatively. 

We rolled up the 5-year-old's certificate and stuck it in a balloon for him to pop, and the 13-year-old's went in this folded paper pyramid. In future years maybe we'll wrap certificates in a bunch of boxes inside each other, have them follow a strand of yarn all over the house to find it, make a scavenger hunt, or write it in a scrambled language to decode.

Q: What kind of experience gifts did you give?

We're big believers in family time over individual date nights with each child, so it felt natural for us to include everyone who was able to participate in each experience. Here's what we did last year:

5yo: Trampoline park for the whole family

7yo: Laser tag for the whole family

10yo: Escape room for one parent and the 3 kids who were old enough

13yo: Adult go-kart racetrack for one parent and all kids who met the height requirement

15yo: Virtual reality room for the teenagers and a parent

17yo: Semester of piano lessons at a local music school (not exactly a family experience, but it was something she really, really wanted)

We found a lot of ideas by searching our city on Groupon and Trip Advisor. You could try indoor skydiving, pop-up museums, an overnight hotel stay with a pool and pizza for dinner, or one of those pay-by-the-pound ice cream places where you do all the toppings. The experiences could even be free: a cool sledding hill they've never been to before, or an "anything goes" night where they stay up late and create the itinerary.

Q: How did your first giftless Christmas go?

Every time we drove home from one of those experiences with the kids talking about it excitedly with each other in the backseat, I felt like we'd done the right thing. This year there was no wasted time and effort tracking down presents no one used, no landfill of wrapping paper and packaging waste in the living room, no meltdowns the week afterward trying to organize the avalanche of toys. I even heard my 10-year-old exclaim several times at the escape room "This is the best Christmas present EVER!!!"

Q: Were there any downsides to not exchanging gifts at Christmas?

A: It was challenging to juggle so many people's schedules to find a time to actually do all the experience gifts. We tried to complete as many as possible in the week between Christmas and New Years, but we didn't finish all of them until March. Also, our no-gift Christmas was not cheap. Most people assume we saved a ton of money, but obviously eight admissions to the trampoline park costs more than a few plastic toys. In all, it probably ended up costing about the same as before.

Q: Any tips for me if I want to try a no-gift Christmas with my family?

A: In the past, we'd tried encouraging extended family members to get us experience gifts, which was met with mixed reactions and didn't work well for a variety of reasons. We found it was much easier to fix our own gift-giving and let everyone else do what they felt comfortable with.

Start out by clearly deciding what you're trying to accomplish with a no-gift Christmas: to be more environmentally conscious? more responsible with your money? less overwhelmed by the number of toys in the house? Involve the kids, come up with a plan, and commit to trying it for just one year. Explain you can always go back if they don't like it.

Q: What if I want to downsize Christmas but I'm not ready to give up gifts altogether?

Dip your toes in by giving experience gifts with a small related trinket, like a zoo pass with a dollar store bag of plastic animals or tickets for a monster truck rally with a Hot Wheels vehicle. It will get you and your kids used to the idea without going completely cold-turkey.

You can also explore other ways to ease your holiday burnout. If there's Christmas decor you don't really like putting up, get rid of it. Ask your family their favorite Christmas traditions and eliminate the ones on the bottom of the list. Deep down you probably know what should be cut out to make things simpler, you just need to give yourself permission to do it.

We're heading into our second no-gift Christmas, and I couldn't be more excited. It's freeing not to orchestrate who's getting what with a literal spreadsheet starting in September, and I know that the day after Christmas I'll wake up to a calendar of fun things to do with my kids instead of a house full of clutter and chaos. At least, not any more full of it than usual.

Click to Share:

Read More »

In Search of a Less Wasteful Christmas

It's December 1^st, and if this were any other year I would've had at least one holiday prep-related mental breakdown by now. But it hasn't happened yet, and here's the beautiful reason why: my husband and I aren't getting the kids gifts this year.

Before you start penning your letters to CPS, please hear me out. It's all part of a bigger plan. In fact, it was the kids' idea.

For years now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that our Christmas season was out of control. I tried to simplify and streamline everything I could, using task management apps, jettisoning traditions that were more work than enjoyment, even paring down our holiday decor so it didn't feel like such a big job.

But I couldn't quite bring myself to re-examine our gift-giving. It was Christmas, after all: the one day a year (other than their birthdays) when the kids get presents. And Evans family tradition had it that every kid received four gifts from Mom and Dad on Christmas morning, plus another from Santa.

Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but with 6 kids that equals 30+ presents to shop for... not including stocking stuffers. 

I don't want to know how many hours I've spent poring over holiday gift lists and wracking my brain for any conceivable way to commodify my kids' interests: the 7-year-old likes basketball, what product goes with that? A new ball? A jersey? A basketball nightlight for his room? A life-sized cutout of LeBron James? 

Which, to be honest, always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable. If my son was happily playing basketball with what we had already, wouldn't he rather have me just go outside and play with him instead of hiding inside furtively reading "52 Awesome Gifts for Kids Who Can't Get Enough of the Game"?

Not only that, I was also feeling burnt out. I was tired of the planning, the brainstorming sessions, and the shopping. I was tired of the ordering and the tracking. I had come to resent the color-coded spreadsheet of which items we'd chosen but not ordered, and which ones we'd ordered but hadn't yet arrived. 

And I don't even want to talk about the gift wrapping.

Christmas 2016. I know.

But hey, I figured, that's just the way Christmas is, and resolved that the only thing I could do was change my attitude and try to enjoy the ride.

The gift-giving question was forgotten for a few more years, until this past spring. Inspired by The Minimal Mom on YouTube, I did a massive declutter of the house.

From the attic to the basement, I was ruthless in my purging. I didn't throw out any of the kids' stuff without their knowledge, but what I did do was give them permission to get rid of absolutely anything — anything — they didn't use or love. Even (and maybe especially) if they felt like they "should" keep it for some other reason.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of the stuff we'd given them for Christmas just a few months earlier sailed right out the door that spring, and it was a real eye-opener to me and my husband. All those hours we'd spent hunting down the perfect gifts... maybe it wasn't as worth it as we used to think. 

I don't care for excess and Phillip doesn't like waste, and looking at the pile of items the kids happily discarded once they had permission was hard evidence that we'd inadvertently been creating a lot of both.

So what to do with this wake-up call?

We considered having the kids start drawing up wish lists, but only briefly. I didn't like the idea of reducing gift-giving to an "I put in my order and you fill it" transaction. (Where's the magic in that?) And to be honest, I wasn't sure that shoving a toy catalog in front of my 5-year-old would be any less wasteful than what we'd already been doing. 

We posed the question to the kids at a family meeting, and they came up with a creative solution: experience gifts instead of tangible ones. In the next few weeks, they'll be giving us two or three ideas of something they'd like to do, see, or visit in the week between Christmas and New Years, and Phillip and I will either choose something from the list or surprise them.

But here's the kicker: that will be their only gift from us. Phillip and I are out of the presents-that-go-in-a-box game.

The 5- and 7-year-olds were a little concerned, but were fine once we assured them they'd still get stuff from their grandparents, and Santa will still fill their stockings and bring them one physical present. Our Christmas isn't going to be ascetic, just reasonable.

Ultimately, I realized that no matter how much time and effort we put into selecting the perfect things to put under the tree, we can never guarantee they won't end up in a pile of clutter no one uses. 

Giving experiences, however, is a different story. Even if your experience gift ends up being a dud (you got a flat tire on the way there, the tour guide was crabby, and the whole thing was not at all what you expected,) you still spent time together creating memories. It's always a net positive.

This Christmas will be much different, but in a good way. I know I won't miss waking up exhausted from present-wrapping to hunt down batteries and run tech support for new gadgets, and I don't think the kids will mind having fewer presents under the tree. Instead, we'll have a calendar full of fun things to do together, and none of us can hardly wait.

Click to Share:

Read More »

Extreme Decluttering 101: Everything I Learned From Tackling My Messy House

Confession: I've always liked throwing stuff away, and I've always been quick to get rid of stuff that served no purpose. At least I thought I was.

But this spring I discovered a YouTuber called The Minimal Mom and long story short, ended up getting rid of 50% of our belongings. 

During an intense two months of attic-to-basement decluttering, here are some invaluable lessons I learned about figuring out how to live with less.

1. Invest in a "Maybe" Bin

When I first embarked on my decluttering journey, I kept the things I couldn't live without and put everything else in a temporary "maybe" bin. I was really aggressive about putting things in the "maybe" bin because nothing was permanent: if I regretted not having something, I could always take it back out and forget it ever happened.

I planned to keep things in the bin for 6 months as a test run of minimalism, but I was surprised to find that most of the time it only took about 10 minutes. The act of physically separating an item from the collection of "my stuff," then stepping back to look at my decluttered closet/shelf/cupboard and seeing that I still felt good about it, made letting go of things shockingly easy. 

After decluttering the entire house and garage from top to bottom, I think I ultimately took about five things back out of the "maybe" bin.

2. Consider a Tattoo that Says "Do I Use This?"

I'd done my fair share of decluttering before, but now that I was serious about it I approached each item we owned with the question "Do we use this?" instead of "Could we use this?" (It's super-important to note that these are two completely different questions.)

Honestly answering the question "Do we use this?" helped me part with items I've kept for years but could've been stolen by a burglar in the night and I most likely never would've known the difference.

If I got stuck on any item, I'd ask a follow-up question: "Would my life be any different without this?" It helped to acknowledge that getting rid of many things wouldn't negatively impact my life, it would only make the house less cluttered and easier to clean.

3. If You Won't Regret It, Get Rid of It

I encountered plenty of items that passed the "do we use this?" test, but I still got rid of them because they weren't adding very much value to my life. These two questions helped me identify those items:

• "Will I miss this?" 
• "What would happen if this item was gone?"

"Will I miss this?" helped me part with clothes I still wore but didn't particularly like. If I had other clothes I liked better, was I ever going to regret getting rid of that cream-colored sweater that shrunk a little in the dryer?

"What would happen if this was gone?" helped when I came across a cache of thermoses in my kitchen. If I didn't have the large size, I'd feel annoyed for less than a second and make do with the medium one, so I decided to donate it. 

Everything is a trade-off, and I decided that for me, the convenience of keeping an item has to justify the inconvenience of having to clean, maintain, organize, and store it.

4. We Become Immune to Our Stuff

Everything in our home multiplies, including furniture, decor on the walls and tabletops, and the contents of every cupboard, closet, and drawer. I think this is because we keep adding stuff, only "seeing" the new pieces and not the ones that were already there. 

Less than two years ago, I bought a storage cabinet because our family's scriptures and church books were scattered all over the house and we desperately needed a place for them. But once I purged the bookshelf we already had, it turned out there was plenty of room for them in there. 

I moved our church stuff into the bookshelf, sold the cabinet we'd apparently never needed, and learned a valuable lesson: don't add anything new to your house until you look around at what's already there. 

5. We Don't Have Time for All the Things... and That's Okay

For me, the kids' stuff was the hardest to declutter. We had a large craft cabinet, game cupboard, activity shelf, and a bunch of toys that rotated in and out of the attic. They were all perfectly good things that the kids played with. 

Well, when they remembered those things were there, anyway.

Eventually, I came to the realization that my kids don't have time to play with every good toy in existence (just like I don't have time to read every good book or visit every exciting place in the world) ...and that's okay. 

Decluttering is, at the heart of it, acknowledging that we have limitations on our time. In the end, I made peace with the fact that the kids will play with whatever we have, and they won't play with whatever we don't have, and either way they'll be just fine. (And, by the way, I didn't get rid of anything without their knowledge.)

6. Get Rid of Duplicate Items

We are a family of eight people who eat virtually every meal at home, so I honestly thought we needed two cheese graters, six spatulas, two sets of measuring cups, and eight mixing bowls... because we used all of them!

But I realized the duplicates were actually part of the problem with my messy kitchen. If something was dirty, we'd just grab the second (or third) duplicate instead of washing it, and so it would go, and by the end of every day the dirty dishes were stacked sky-high.

Once we got rid of the duplicates, we could no longer make that enormous stack if we tried. With fewer dishes, we end up washing the same number of things in a 24-hour period — but now the counter stays clean in between loads. 

I've known for a long time that a perpetually messy kid's room is a sign of having too many toys, but I guess the same principles also applies to kitchens, too.

7. You'll Feel Relieved

Did you know our stuff can make us feel bad? Me, neither. But as I decluttered, some very strange things happened.

For example, I got rid of a dress I love and a wave of relief washed over me. Why? Because years ago, the undershirt that goes with it went missing, and I'd been hanging onto the dress ever since in the hopes of finding a new shirt that could work. It wasn't until I finally decided to donate the dress that I realized I'd been feeling bad every time I saw it hanging in the closet, unable to be worn.

Later that same week, my daughter told me she was glad we pared down the craft supplies. She'd grown into other interests, but the presence of those unused craft supplies made her feel guilty about not using them. Meanwhile, I had no idea she even remembered they were even there.

It's kind of hard to describe the contented feeling of looking around a room and knowing that everything in it is something you use and love, but that's what I love most about decluttering. I'm more likely to fix broken things or deal with paperwork now instead of putting it off, and more motivated to clean up because it doesn't take all day to make a difference. 

And that's really saying something, because I hate cleaning.

Click to Share:

Read More »

Please, Don't Give Us More Stuff This Christmas

The air is getting chillier. Halloween has come and gone. As we inevitably head toward Christmas, I have one thing to say to my dear friends and extended family members: PLEASE don't buy my kids any more crap.

Seriously, I'm begging you. I'm waving a white flag. No more.

My kids don't need new stuff. They can't even take care of the stuff they have.

There are books on the floor 6 inches from the bookshelf. Sandbox toys have migrated inside the house.

Tennis rackets and baseball bats lie abandoned in the yard. Stuffed animals multiply in every corner of every room, and the living room carpet is a sea of building blocks and plastic food.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how this happens. Some people would describe us as minimalists.

Our house contains a third of the toys most houses have, even though we have three times the kids. I'm constantly going through our toys, books, craft supplies, and clothes, and I'm ruthless about chucking anything we don't actually need.

I do this because I know each new thing we acquire represents hours of tripping on it, picking it up, cleaning it, maintaining it, moving it to vacuum, changing its batteries, figuring out what's wrong when it stops working, arbitrating fights over it, searching for it under beds and couch cushions, and going back into the post office to look for it when someone accidentally leaves it behind.

It represents hours of wandering the aisles of Home Depot looking for appropriately-sized receptacles and furniture to contain it.

It represents days of figuring out where to put it, sorting our old stuff into keep/donate/toss piles and carting boxes and bags to the donation center.

And then I'll have to do it all over again next Christmas.

It's not that I want to move us all to a cave in the mountains and live like ascetic monks (not most of the time, anyway.) It's just that sometimes, I dread the pile of presents beneath the Christmas tree.

As I watch my kids tear the wrapping paper off a new Lego set — a creative and wonderful toy by any measure — I know that two months from now it will have become just another piece of junk to step on in the middle of the night.

I will come to hate the sound of my own voice yelling at the kids to clean it up. I'll run over the pieces on purpose as I vacuum the carpet just to get them out of my sight.

The truth is, we don't need more stuff for Christmas. And I personally don't want anything except for time.

I can now count the number of years until my oldest leaves for college on one hand. I don't want to spend those years managing an excess of stuff we don't even need. We're starved for time, and every thing we own means we have even less of it.

Please understand it's not the gifts and toys themselves that are making me crazy: it's what we're trading away in order to have them.

Click to Share:

Read More »

The Life-Changing Magic of Throwing Crap Away (And Some Rules for Decluttering Your House)

It all started with a book.

Not The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I think I reserved that at the library back in 2015 when everyone on the Internet was Kondo-ing their collective minds out, but I forgot to pick it up and the library waits for no man. Or mom.

No, I read a book called Simplicity Parenting, and that was the beginning of something.

I've never been a hoarder. In fact, I've always been more likely to throw things away than hang onto them. I've always hated clutter and loved big, empty space.

But with 6 kids, it just kind of happens. First there's one stuffed animal in the bed, then five, and one day you go in there and realize that the top bunk is in danger of collapsing under the weight of hundreds of plush figures. They bring home party favors. People give gifts.

And even though I'm sort of a minimalist, I also hate wasting anything. So what if that car doesn't have any wheels left? The kids still play with it. Bits and pieces of craft materials will still get used.

I also hesitate to throw things out because I'm no stranger to the way my kids play: anything can become a part of their game. So when I cut something out of felt, the scraps became rugs for their dolls and disappeared into their room.

Basically, my children are ferrets.

But when I picked up Simplicity Parenting, and I realized that it was taking my kids forever to clean their rooms at night, and that I was just going around picking things up all day long, I decided to change things.

Their rooms were not packed to overflowing, but I went through each and every toy, book, marker, and game. Room by room, I've been either trashing or donating ⅓ of its contents since November. (I do move some toys to the attic to rotate back to their rooms sometime in the future.)

Basically, I follow a simple 3-step process:

Step 1: Remove everything. Literally take everything out of the closets and shelves and put it on the floor. Yes, this means it gets much worse before it gets better.

Your husband will definitely choose this moment to walk by and passively-aggressively thank you for tidying up.

Do not skip this step. Throwing it all in a pile on the floor means:

1. You'll be forced to finish this job instead of giving up and watching Netflix halfway through. 
2. It becomes MORE WORK to put something back in the closet/cabinet/room than to get rid of it. If you do this, only stuff you really, truly want will go back in. 
3. You can clean the nasty shelves that have been accumulating crumbs and hair and dust and all other sorts of unholy things when you weren't looking.

Step 2: Sort it into piles. My patented four-pile system is:

• Trash -  crumpled sketches of who knows what. Action figures without heads. Pop up books that have been destroyed by grabby baby hands. Random pieces of plastic that serve no purpose. Why is there so much random plastic?? 
• Donate - toys that only do one thing and don't entertain for long. Things you always pick up but rarely see played with. Picture books you've always secretly hated. (I was riding the high of giving away Barbie and the Secret Door for days.)
• Move to Somewhere Else - I still want it, I'm just keeping it in a dumb place. Like the misspelled "MOMY" bracelet from my preschooler in my jewelry box (it was supposed to say 'mommy.') It's cute and I want to keep it, but not to wear on a regular basis so it shouldn't go with my everyday jewelry.
• Keep - once all the other piles have been taken care of, I usually go through the 'keep' pile one more time. Then I start organizing everything left and putting it in its new home.

Step 3: Force everyone to admire your work. Really. Stop everybody in the house from what they're doing and tell them to go appreciate it. Don't let them leave until they sufficiently do. If they don't adequately comment on what an amazing transformation this is, physically point their face toward the newly organized space and yell, "LOOK AT IT!!"

Once I started doing this in every room of the house, a few interesting things started to happen.

First, the kids actually started playing with the stuff they have. When the shelves in our dining room/craft area were crammed with kits to make-your-own-everything, they used none of them. They didn't even know they were there.

Once we got rid of all but one or two, they rediscovered them. I used to think my kids weren't crafters; now I think they were just overwhelmed.

The second thing was that their rooms stayed clean. Before, it was always a disaster so they wouldn't even bother cleaning up after themselves, because really, what was the point? I couldn't blame them.

With less stuff, it only takes 5 minutes for the whole room. Sometimes, they even clean up without even being asked (the older ones, anyway.) And by the way, this is the kind of claim I'd previously read and yell "Liar!" while chucking a boot at the screen. But it's true.

Having seen this with my own eyes, I don't hesitate now to be very selective in the things that enter my home and very liberal in getting rid of things that are already inside it.

And next time our stuff starts multiplying on its own as stuff always does, I'll know exactly what to do about it.

Click to Share:

Read More »