Sorting Your Way Through the Christmas Aftermath

Christmas has come and gone, bags of ripped-off wrapping paper have been toted to the garbage, and the tree is waiting at the curb to be recycled. All the traditional paraphernalia has been lovingly put away, from the precious glass ornaments to the treasured school projects. But your house still feels over-run by the holidays.

That’s because you have yet have to face the most daunting task of all: Finding homes for the multitude of toys and miscellaneous bric-a-brac your kids just got.

There’s an easy way to get everything out from underfoot. Just shove it all into random places in your children’s rooms and then shut their doors (if you can). The easy way takes a few minutes and certainly clears your living room of Barbie debris and wayward Hot Wheels. But it dooms you to an endless cycle of exasperation and frustration every time you fight your way back into their rooms. Don’t be surprised when all those toys spill back into the rest of your house.

There’s another way, one with long-term payoffs, where everything has a place and there’s plenty of space in your child’s room. This way requires some actual time and effort. Don’t be afraid. You can do this. The key to successfully integrating all those new Christmas toys is sorting and clearing. You’ll need to sort the books from the cars, the stuffed animals from the art supplies, and the still-loved from the no-longer-needed. Then you’ll need to clear out enough stuff to make room for the new.
Make a cup of coffee because this is going to take awhile. Make sure your child is on-board and excited. Pitch the idea to him as an exciting way to start the new year; a few simple changes will make it seem like a new room and a great gift all on its own. You may get some resistance at first, but if you focus on the fact that you’ll be doing it together, and that he gets you to himself for the duration, you’ll find you have a happy helper at least for a while.

Now grab your kid, some upbeat music, and a stack of garbage bags. Designate a bag for garbage and a bag for donations. Roll up your sleeves and dig in, you’re on a mission.

Tackle the big things right off the bat: Strip the bed of all its linens and load them into the washing machine right away. This will clear a big empty space for you to start laying out groups of toys. While you’re at it, grab all the dirty clothes lying around and take them to the laundry room. Move on to the clean clothes. Empty out all dressers, closets, backpacks and duffle bags. Grab everything and tote it down to your room where it can be tried on, sorted and refolded later. This is the perfect time to go through his wardrobe to weed out what no longer fits.

With those bulky items out of the room, things will start to open up visually, which will give you hope. Continue to empty the room, organizing quickly as you go. Create piles in the hallway of all the books, board games, videos and other bulky but easily-stacked items. Toss the stuffed animals – all of them – into another room to get them out of the way till you can deal with them later.

Children’s toys tend to come with their own processions of accessories; as you come across assorted bits and pieces put them on the bed in groups, still organizing as you go. Tell your child to do as you do, putting the superheroes together in one pile, cars in another, and art supplies in yet another.

As you make your way through the accumulated treasures in your child’s room, make sure you throw every broken toy and scrap of garbage away immediately. Keep the garbage bag in the middle of the room for easy access. As soon as it’s full tie it off and start a new one.

Set up a different garbage bag for toys, clothing and stuffed animals that your child is ready to donate. It can be very hard for a child to give up a toy, even if he hasn’t touched or thought about it in years. If your child hasn’t donated any toys in the past, spend some time figuring out how to introduce the idea beforehand. Keep in mind that the most effective way to encourage your child to donate toys and outgrown clothes is to set the example.

At some point, your child will lose interest and wander off to do something a lot more exciting, like zoning out in front of the same cartoon rerun he’s seen 18 times. Good. That gives you a chance to do some stealth tossing and cleaning. This is a really good time to throw out the remote that controls nothing and the broken toy laptop with the crusty layer of battery acid on its underside. Games with a lot of missing pieces should go, too. Don’t throw out well-loved toys without discussing it with your child; that’s just mean.

If you’ve kept up your momentum and managed not to get side-tracked, you’ll be seeing light at the end of the tunnel any time now.

The most daunting and difficult part of the job is done, and it wasn’t even that hard. Together you and your child have sorted through everything, thrown out all the broken stuff, and chosen which toys to donate. This is where the sorting pays off. In front of you now should be groupings that tell you immediately how much space they’ll need to be stored in and where they should live.

All that’s left to do is put everything away. Step back and look around; storage solutions should present themselves to you. Start with the obvious, like putting all the books back on the book shelves, all the homework supplies in the desk, and so on. Is there a place in the garage for all the sports equipment and remote controlled cars?

If you have sorted everything in the room, thrown out some of it and designated some to be donated, you should find yourself with more space to work with than you had imagined. Call your child back into the room to help decide where things go; remember that he’s going to be responsible for putting it away every day, so it makes sense that he should have some input.
Remember that bedding you washed earlier? When all is said and done, your child will have a clean room and fresh sheets to crawl into that night, and a really good feeling about his space. It should be a lot easier to encourage him to keep it up when having it clean feels so good.

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