After getting home from our church Christmas service and feast at about 3 am this morning, we had another luxuriously lazy, imperfect Christmas day around here. M spent an hour or so about to puke right in the middle of opening presents. We never got out of our PJs. We spent the afternoon and evening stuffing and labeling the already-late Christmas cards. We topped it all off with a “Christmas Dinner” of pre-cooked spiral ham, canned green beans, and microwave cauliflower potatoes in our day-old pjs. Heaven.
Here’s hoping you all had a joyous Nativity and a similarly beautiful day full of not-too-much and not-too-little but just right of everything.
Yeah, this was from Christmas Eve. We weren’t wearing anything this fancy today.
Gifts, decoration, events, food–there just seems to be so much much at Christmas time. Like so many parents, this is the hardest time of year for me to show restraint, to say no to my kid. To buy less, do less, eat less. But, what’s Christmas like when you plan to move into a bus in 6 months? Well, we’re definitely not doing less. But we are trying to have and buy less.
Don’t worry. We’ll have a few more gifts than this. Still, it’ll be a lot less than last year.
I have always been a gift-giver. It’s what they call my “love language,” or, one of the main ways I show my love. For most of my adult life, I’ve had a “gift closet” where I accumulated gifts for people throughout the whole year. Whenever I saw something that someone I loved would like, I’d buy it and put it away for the next gift-giving time. This usually resulted in lots of gifts for my friends and family members. I was a maximalist in gift-giving, just like I was in most other areas of my life.
When I had a child, my gift-giving really went into high gear. All the things I thought she should have (wooden blocks, plastic dinosaurs, dolls, duplos, a play kitchen) combined with all the things I never got to have and all the things she actually asked for to make for, well, too many gifts under the tree. I’d hear about how giving books at Christmas was a good tradition. So, I’d add a few books under the tree. I’d see an adorable ornament featuring some character she liked, so ornament-giving also became a yearly tradition. Just to be fair, I also had most of these same traditions with my husband, giving him a few books and a Darth Vader ornament in addition to whatever else I’d gotten him. (I’d then be hurt when I only had a couple gifts from him…but that’s a story for another time.) All the while, I was wondering how I could ever teach my child to be happy with what she had. And, I’d try to portray our Christmas’s as modest, low key affairs. Yeah, there was some difficult rationalization and justification going on in my head.
As I’ve become less focused on (and more fed up with) stuff, some of my gift-giving has waned, or become more manageable. It’s always a shock when I get to a week before Christmas and realize, “Oh. I never got a gift for so-and-so.” (Just as a side note, I’ve also experienced less expectation of gifts myself as my own gift giving has “downsized.”)
This year, as we anticipate having almost no room very soon, it’s hard to know what to give to my immediate family–useful things like travel clothes, small things like nice ballpoint pens, and things you use up like candy and fancy lotion.
Another idea that’s all over these days is the “experiences instead of stuff” gift. I like this a lot. I like it less just because it’s so trendy right now. But, that being said, this year we planned a family gift/trip on Dec 23rd as a big part of our Christmas presents. We stayed a night at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville (in one of the balcony rooms that look out on the conservatory that we’d always wanted to stay in!) and took ourselves the next afternoon, today actually, to see the Nutcracker at the Ryman Theater. It was a blast. Truly.
On the balcony of our hotel room at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville at Christmas time — our “family Christmas gift.”
Would my daughter have been understanding if our great family time in Nashville meant no gifts under the tree? Probably not. It’s a process. And we’ll probably always have a few gifts there under the tree. They might be small things, though. Of course, some pretty great things come in very small packages!
Even I can’t believe it. But there it is, right out my kitchen window–all 40 feet of yellow-orangeness. Like, an actual school bus. That we’re going to live in. Sitting there saying, alternately:
Wow! What wonderful adventures we’re going to have together!
our bus
and
What the hell did you just do?
also our bus
We had been talking about buying or building a tiny house on wheels for a couple years. We even went to the tiny house festival. We spent the weekend in a tiny house. We decided to do it…someday.
Someday, when we’d gotten rid of more stuff. Someday, when we’d saved up the tens of thousands of dollars to have a tiny house the size we wanted. Someday, when my husband was ready to quit the job he’s been at for 25 years.
Then, one day I realized that school buses had just about the same amount of room (minus lofts) as a really long tiny house on wheels…and that they come with their own means of towing themselves (I mean, we and all our stuff probably don’t weigh more than 70 kids and the seats they sit on!)…and that they only cost about $5000.
So, I told my husband,
“I think we should start looking at school buses.”
He said
“Ummmm…. Are you sure?”
And I said,
“Ummm…. I think so.”
A couple days later he was spending all his spare time on his phone, looking at retired school buses on Craigslist and other online sites, counting windows and trying to figure out dimensions from really bad pictures. A couple days later, we drove down to Knoxville to see our first bus. And, man, it was a rust bucket. Still, it being the first bus we’d ever thought about buying, we were afraid we might be passing up a good deal and took much longer deciding to say no than we should have.
The next two weeks, my husband went back and forth between being excited about the little bits of info he got from people-selling-buses-online and feeling like we’d never find one we’d like. (I mean, who knew there was such variety in school buses?)
We looked at a few more and passed on them. Then one day, someone told him there was a good bus (40-footer, rear-engine, great condition, full “basement”) for sale nearby on an online marketplace. I messaged the guy, and the rest is history. Turns out, he had hundreds of messages from people who were interested, but he had only replied to me because he was busy getting ready for his daughter’s swim meet. It was meant to be.
We’ve already made all kinds of plans and have had all kinds of ideas. We’ll see how it all works out. It’s not like we’ve ever done this before. Luckily, Jason is one handy and industrious guy. Stay tuned!
I have accepted my maximalism. I don’t apologize for it. I’ve often gloried in it as I hung a whole wall of frame-to-frame pictures or sorted my hundreds (thousands?) of buttons into color categories and put them in jars or opened my drawer to choose from my many different colored and patterned shirts.
But, what happens when a maximalist decides (for many reasons that we will go into later) to “go tiny”? Will I inevitably become a minimalist? How hard will it be to get rid of some of my stuff, and how much of it will have to go? Will it be donated? Will it earn money? How will my family cope?
I’m going to be living the answers to these questions over the next 6 months. It’s gonna get ugly. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I’m already completely overwhelmed. But, man, I’m pretty darn excited.
Do you love rich, colorful pattens? Do you like to “collect” things? Do you, in fact, have a collection or collections? Do you mix eras and styles and textures in your decor? Do you always err on the side of too much rather than too little? If so, you might be a maximalist like me.
A maximalist is the opposite of a minimalist. Those of us with maximalist tendencies are drawn to excess and even redundancy. (One might be so bold as to call my 12 teapots a little redundant. Especially since my husband is the only one around here who drinks tea.)
Maximalists don’t have to be clutter freaks or hoarders. We just like the feel of more around us. Bare walls make us nervous. Our refrigerators usually stay at maximum capacity. If we travel, we like to visit a new place every couple of days and fit in as much as we can. If we are crafty sorts of people, our craft closets/fabric drawers are so full of beautiful prints and stripes and solids that it’s sometimes hard to close them. When we find a half-price sale on our favorite shirts, we think, “Great! I can buy twice as many!” (And not, like my husband thinks, “Oh, good, I only have to pay half as much.”)
If any of this describes you, then welcome to my tribe! I love your style, friend.
