Monday, September 08, 2008

Negative Christmas Presents

Many followers of this blog, like me, live in a consumption-oriented society. Since we moved house last year I've stopped accumulating furniture but we're accumulating DVDs, CDs, books and games at an apparently increasing rate. When we moved in there was heaps of space in our house, but we've expanded to fill it.

My baby sister is experiencing the same problem, even though she is much younger than me and has years of accumulation to catch up on. In email about plans for Christmas she wrote:
"We certainly do not need any more stuff,( if you know any people without stuff they can have some of ours,)"
It occurred to me that a good family thing to do would be to help each other actually get rid of stuff. Maybe we could:
* help each other clean out the shed / bookshelf / liquor cabinet (yes, even my liquor cabinet is overfull).
* rent a skip
* bring a ute around and cart some stuff to a charity.

So the Christmas objective would be to end up with LESS stuff than before. That certainly works for me. Any ideas?

3 comments:

Alister Scott said...

Good idea.
One of the benefits of living in a small apartment such as ours is we don't accumulate that much junk.
I think the best order to attack too much junk is to reduce, reuse and then recycle.

gerrod said...

It certainly shouldn't be difficult to make more space in the liquor cabinet...

As for the CDs and DVDs, buy yourself an external harddrive, and start ripping them all. If you're concerned about quality, just rip to one of the lossless formats. Handbrake does a pretty good job of most DVDs, though apparently it works better on Mac than on PC. Not sure how the Linux version goes but I guess there's only one way to find out!

Sandie Elsom said...

I would be delighted to help you clean out your liquor cabinet.