With the holidays well over and life returning to normal to a degree it’s the perfect time to reflect on all that was as well as all the stuff that it brought. For, if your house is like mine, you’re still inundated with “stuff.” It’s piled high. It’s taken over the dog’s bed. It’s overflowing the trashcans. It’s occupying every available nook, cranny and crevice from the front door to the back. Shoot, you scratch an armpit and some nick-knack falls out.
It’s the attack of the killer Christmas stuff.
The holidays breed it, whether it’s gifts you haven’t found a place for, the decorations and ornaments that still need to go away or the mountains of other things that emerge from secret hiding places to crowd your domicile.
“Why is there a spare tire in the living room?!?”
But there’s a method to the madness. If you look very closely at all that chaos, you’ll see there is really order. You’ll find patterns — a series of universal constants that make up what I call “Stuff Theory.” That’s right, stuff theory: that which governs all the crap that you collect in your house, especially right after Christmas. Don’t understand? Well, see if you recognize some of these Stuff Theory constants in your own house:
Constant No. 1 — Toys that your daughter hasn’t played with ever, and that you’re now weeding out so you have room for all of the new toys she won’t play with, will become incredibly attractive to her once she sees you put them in a bag by the front door. She will begin to play with them, and if you try to take them away, she will pitch a fit and threaten legal action against you.
Constant No. 2 — If you leave any stuff you plan on returning for a refund stacked up in your living room, your sister-in-law will inevitably walk over to it, get curious and begin opening the packaging, rendering it all un-returnable.
Constant No. 3 — Once you have scoured the house, loaded all of the Christmas decorations up in their boxes, and carried them like a Sherpa up into the deepest, darkest recesses of the attic, you will emerge proud of yourself and feeling accomplished only to find a Santa Claus figurine staring at you from the most obvious of locations. Addendum to this constant: You will also fight the urge to take it back up into the attic, and instead will believe it looks great on a table where it will stay until next Christmas.
Constant No. 4 — Even though you know that somewhere deep down inside a Mount Everest-sized stack of letters, catalogs, junk mail, receipts, and other assorted paperwork rests the one overdue bill you so desperately need, you will never find it. (Also in that pile is a generous gift certificate that some kind family member gave you. It, too, is lost forever.)
Constant No. 5 — No matter how hard you work at eliminating those piles of gifts and other assorted crap you stacked up in your bedroom before Christmas (all to keep it out of family members’ eyesight), this equation will always hold true: Number of piles multiplied by 3.6735 equals the number of months it will take you to put it all away.
Constant No. 6 — A grilled cheese your daughter started eating, but never finished, exactly three weeks ago will eventually turn up two-thirds of the way down one of those piles. Also, the mere sight or smell will cause you to blackout as you try to dispose of it.
Recognize some of these? I believe I’ve started a new science. Should I find funding out there, I might just be able to begin solving some of the universe’s most confounding problems.