I've always been fond of Boxing Day...even though few people have actually heard of it in the U.S.  In the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the day after Christmas was traditionally a time for people who could afford it to give a box of gifts to their poorer neighbors.  Granted, Boxing Day is now more akin to our Black Friday, but I like the original holiday I read about in British children's books during my formative years.

Until I moved to the farm, I was a bit of a vagrant, moving every year.  The yearly move gave me a great opportunity to go through all of my possessions and cull out items that I really didn't feel like carrying up and down several flights of stairs, donating them to Goodwill.  Now that we've been living on the farm for over three years, lack of a yearly move has led to far too much clutter.

This week, Mark and I started on our own version of Boxing Day.  We each went through our clothes with a fine-tooth comb, culling about half of them to be given away.  The result is immediate gratification --- space!  Next on my "Boxing Day" agenda will be culling my books, the only other items that seem to build up in my living space.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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