My mother asked me if I wanted her gift boxes.
I said no, I had plenty of my own.
She was talking about holiday boxes that you buy in sets of three or so. Or used to get from better quality department stores. They come "flat" and by bending pieces in their corners, they turn into a box.
I have gift boxes I have had for years and years.
My mother did too. When I said I did not want them, she said they were going in recycling. So I don't think she has them any more.
My grandmother probably had gift boxes that were older than I was, at any age.
My mother's reasoning, in getting rid of her gift boxes, is that we now live in a gift
bag world.
Never would I have thought of that, but it is probably true. As my gift bag useage goes up, my gift box useage has plummeted.
I can't actually remember the last time I got out a gift
box. I have quite the stash of them, in my closet, in a bin or two. I remember being pleased with that stash, long ago.
Like my mother, I am also cleaning out my gift
box stash. In fact I am doing it today. I thought about Goodwill. But I do not think they would survive the donation room. And I am afraid someone there might pitch them in the regular garbage, so I am recycling them too.
I have quite the stash of gift
bags. In fact I just moved that gift bag stash from the cupboard under the stairs to a bin under my bed. Much easier to store and access there.
We use gift bags. When I need to buy them, when nothing in the stash works for a particular gift, I buy very generic, inexpensive gift bags. We save reusable gift bags, given with gifts to us, from other people. Those are usually very nice bags. And that amazes me, because I would not buy expensive ones.
My grandmother saved and then reused wrapping paper, smoothing it and saving in a big box. She had three kids, all married, and seven grandkids. She used a lot of paper. When gifts were opened, she asked us to open carefully, so she could save the paper.
They lived on a farm. No garbage collection (at all). All kitchen scraps went to the animals. Everything that could still be used in any way was reused. Large things were taken to the dump. Small things (like bathroom garbage can waste) were burned. A different life.
It occurs to me that I will still use (not reuse, just use) new wrapping paper, some things come in a box and I will still wrap them as gifts. But I probably use far less paper than I did. I had already, recently noticed that rolls of paper now make it a very long time.
I tried to use the Sunday comics as wrapping paper one holiday. That practice has been rejected. Newspaper ink comes off too easily. I knew that from years of rolling papers with oldest.
My husband has a brother who always uses the comics as wrapping paper. He always sends books as gifts. So when you see comics paper gift under the tree, you know it is from him, and it is a book. He sends great books, almost always signed, and always from a used bookstore. He goes to lots of used bookstores and lots of signings. That, all of that, is actually a great family tradition/memory.
Just this month, after years of hoping, but not pestering, my husband has agreed to stop our newspaper delivery. First I got him from daily to weekend delivery. Now we are stopping all together.
My mother was a huge newspaper person. When her husband went in the nursing home, the paper was delivered to him there. He would read it first, she would take it home with her to read and then put in recycling. That worked really well. When he died, the paper moved back to home delivery. She stopped her subscription a while ago. I am going to ask her if she stopped because of the clutter/recycling issue or if it was to save $. Because if it was to save $, that is what she is getting for Christmas from us, like every year.
If my husband sat down and read the majority of the paper, I would not have cared (as much). But he mostly, honestly, just shuffles it. Piles of papers here there and everywhere. It is a big part of his mess that lives on the kitchen table. He clips coupons like crazy, but then (actually) almost never uses them. He has an iPhone and a laptop which he uses all the time. Coupons are now online. So are ads.
We watch the local and national news. Our local paper is also on line.
I think it was the idea of the paper, not the actual paper for him. I have had things like that too. Where it seemed like something you should do, but never actually did. And I think the day of the printed newspaper is now, naturally, drawing to a close.
We are avid recyclers. Plastic, cardboard, plastic bags, etc. I save plastic bottle lids for whoever is collecting them to make park benches. Sometimes it is a school or a church. If not, the coop sends them to a center that makes toothbrushes for in-need kids.
We are very careful about recycling paper. Yes, newspaper, but also the paper that comes from the mail, school, receipts, etc. Somethings get saved/filed of course. Many things are generic and can go directly in recycling. Anything that has our name or address, I shred. It does not matter what it is, if it is identifiable to us, in any way, I shred it. We have a quality shredder that lives in the computer room. A tall garbage can is on one side of it, a big brown paper recycling bag is on the other. It takes a very long time to fill that computer room garbage. The recycling bag fills constantly.
The mail thing is an area where I have learned to be proactive. My first big push came the year that we moved. I changed our address on things I cared about receiving. I set up mail forwarding. Those forwarded items were all sales mailing list. I called and got off all those lists. I continue to call and get off lists. It is never ending.
Middle does not have recycling where she lives. That really bothers her. She saves all her recycling in her utility closet. We bring it home with us and put it in our recycling. She sends things home with us to be shredded too.
I also have shipping boxes.
My husband has a thing about saving shipping boxes. He looks at them and sees "sturdy" and "what a great size" and "we might be shipping something" and saves them. I used to do that too. Between the two of us, we had a major stash of boxes.
I now get shipping boxes from the post office. The flat rate shipping boxes. Those are what I use for shipping.
But he still saves.
I cut the tape, on a few of his saves, flattening them. They then fit in my container of flat rate boxes in the garage. The ones he saves, he puts intact, in the attic. I clean his stash out, every once in a while, and take them to the recycling center. If I didn't, we would have an attic full of boxes.
I am in the midst of decluttering as you can see from yesterday's pictures.
The thing about an active house is the declutter process never ends.
And the paper/cardboard part of it, is actually huge.
