Materialism

I've been bitten by the Spring Cleaning Bug. I would love to hate it, but I'm having a grand old time making the house all organized and clutter free. Except that you can't really tell unless you've previously been looking in closets and the deep and dark corners of the basement. And it needed to happen, trust me. It's funny how accumulation collects so quickly, and even funnier how there is always at least one corner that gets neglected when the Big Cleaning Spree comes along and you find things from Way Back When and wonder why on earth you hadn't found them earlier.

Today's great find was a bag of gloves and boots from when Becky showed the ponies. That was a few years ago. And the really yummy part is the mouse holes chewed into the bag. Trash. All of it.

How can a family have so much stuff? Seriously, it's like we're personally hoarding for distribution after the apocalypse. I'm finding toys from when Sam and I were kids that our own kids have stopped playing with. And yet we keep them. They're sentimental at this point. There are books that the kids will never read but I can't bring myself to part with because of all the hours I spent reading them before naptime daily. The expensive toys we buy the kids for holidays that they don't use but we need to keep to justify the cost a little more. The extra televisions that were given to us and we have no use for, but they work so we can't throw them out.

Stuff. So much stuff. What would happen if we would pare down to the barest essentials, allowing the kids to keep a handful of toys, we would each have two pair of shoes, clothes that fit in one dresser? Why do we need to be so materialistic? How did we get to this point that we think we need things to make us happy?

I wonder if all the world is like this, or just we Americans? Deep thoughts. Deep thoughts.