{"id":583,"date":"2009-12-13T19:56:22","date_gmt":"2009-12-13T13:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/professional-organizer.com\/WordPress\/?p=583"},"modified":"2009-12-13T19:56:22","modified_gmt":"2009-12-13T13:56:22","slug":"its-a-hard-candy-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/professional-organizer.com\/WordPress\/its-a-hard-candy-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s a hard candy Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

A guest post from Janice Simon, the Clutter Princess.\u00a0 Find her at www.clutterprincess.com<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a hard candy Christmas.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dolly Parton, Singer<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n
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\u201cOne thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n
Erma Bombeck, Humorist<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
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If you wonder why your child\u2019s bedroom is messy, here\u2019s the answer. The average child has 150 toys, according to a Time.com article<\/span><\/span><\/a>, and I\u2019m certain you\u2019ve tripped over all of them in the middle of the night.<\/div>\n
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Over Thanksgiving weekend, a friend told me how his cousin decided to take her two children to an amusement park instead of having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The cousin read somewhere that children between the ages of 8-10 didn\u2019t remember what they got last year for Christmas, but they do remember trips. She and her husband decided to pare down the number of Christmas presents this year and took the kids on the outing.<\/div>\n
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To test this theory, I asked my 10-year-old niece what she got for Christmas last year. Of her entire haul last year, she only remembered two things. She remembered more only after Grandma reminded her. My teen-age niece and nephew remembered most of their gifts. I suspected that if half of the items disappeared from my young niece\u2019s room, she wouldn\u2019t notice.<\/div>\n
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I remember listening to my parents and grandparents talk about what their holidays were like growing up. Mom and her sister each would get one or two gifts from Santa, and their parents would give them nuts, hard candy and oranges in their stockings. Can you imagine a modern day kid getting excited about receiving oranges in their stockings? Instead parents are scrambling for the Zhu Zhu Hamster, which are sold out and selling on the web for upwards of $50 to $60. The actual robotic hamster itself costs around $8 or $9. I told my niece that she would have to wait until after Christmas for one, but I\u2019m sure by then, she\u2019ll be onto something else.<\/div>\n
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As I surveyed my niece\u2019s bedroom filled to the brim, I thought about a Christmas morning long ago. When I was a little girl, my siblings and I got the talk about how tough it was that year for Santa and how he didn\u2019t have that much money. We knew things were tight in our own household so why wouldn\u2019t Santa have it tough too? We were told not to expect that much for Christmas, and we used our aluminum table top tree. We kids didn\u2019t realize at the time that our parents had forgone the real tree to save money, and we loved the sparkly, shiny aluminum tree. On Christmas morning, we each had about five presents under the tree, and I remember my sister and I each got a doll. We were excited and thought we had plenty of presents, and we didn\u2019t find anything missing.<\/div>\n
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Help your children pare down before the holidays (or right after). Try these tips to help:\u00a0<\/div>\n