The Holidays can suck.

Pre-kid and pre-partner, when I was all by myself, I decorated for Christmas because the lights made me happy. Sometimes, I participated in the Secret Santa events at work…so I had a positive focus for the season. Those were some dark ass years when I did everything I could to hide the sadness I felt during the holidays.

Over time, and with years of therapy, I’ve come to truly love the holidays. I now decorate because I want to. I also have real boundaries around what I do and what I don’t.

These boundaries around my time and my space have saved my mental health, and I want you to know you are not alone if you feel the need to put up some boundaries this holiday season.

So what does this have to do with home organizing and management?

One of the biggest topics of conversation I have with my clients is about their mom, or their beloved aunt, or their father in law, who just has too much stuff. (I shared a process people can use to work through this with their parents in this blog post.). Family dinner is a place where all this mess and chaos gets brought up.

So many clients are worried that they will be left to manage an over stuffed room.

Or their moms collection of dolls.

Or a garage full of tools that they’ve been told for years were used to build their childhood home and fix all their toys.

And when that family dinner happens, these items come up — along side a host of other stories and topics that cause so much conflict.

And I am here to remind you that you don’t have to manage the overstuffed room, or take the dolls or the tools. You can even skip the whole dinner affair if it is not what you want to do.

You can have boundaries around your space and your home. You can also have boundaries around the way you choose to spend your time. If you don’t want to go to family dinner, you can say no.

Because what saying no to things that don’t serve you, is say yes to the life you want to live.

You don’t have to live a life full of other’s collections or others ideals.

You can live a life with your collections, or a life of hard core minimalism wherein you have little to no collections.

You have a choice.

Honor it.

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