Hello everyone! Merry Christmas to those who celebrated December 25th, like my household did. We had the lights outside, the Christmas tree inside, with lots of presents under it. Now the early morning hours are over and everything has been unwrapped. Hopefully for some of those tough electronic items, which are encased in the hard plastic, I hope you had some scissors around for them. Or better yet, the box cutters work best! They are super sharp and can be used for much more than just your holiday boxes. A box cutter or safety knife has an advantage over other things like knives or a pair of scissors. They have the extra sharp blades in them, which makes it much easier, tearing into those electronic gift packages.

Now the clean-up process is underway and where do you start? It’s best if you just go ahead and bring the whole box of garbage bags in the living room or den with you. So you have plenty of places to throw trash in. Take 4 or 5 bags out and strategically place them around the room. Save yourself some steps, by placing these trash bags in every corner of the room and a couple of them in the middle of the room. Now when you find a piece of trash or something that needs to be thrown away, you will have a bag nearby to pitch it in. I can’t tell you or stress enough, how much time this will save you.

Don’t throw away any goodies! Be sure to keep your small packages, like the batteries, away from the trash and big pieces of torn Christmas paper. It is so easy to throw them away too. While you watch the kids opening the presents, it’s best to start the sorting process then. It always seems like something gets thrown away on Christmas morning or we think we threw it out. You don’t want to go through 5 garbage bags of trash, to find out, it was under the Christmas tree the whole time. And no matter how well you, the kids, or anyone else knows a certain product, like a new cell phone or a video game, be sure to save all the instructions. I see lots of households every year, wishing they would have kept the instructions, so they could do this or that. No matter how cheap or expensive, it doesn’t matter how big or how small the Christmas gift is, just do your self a big favor and save the instructions!

I hope your family enjoyed the morning today. I hope you only throw the trash away and none of the goodies or those valuable instructions; which you will need in a day or two. Break down the boxes if you need more room in the dumpster or trash cans. Don’t be afraid to get the utility knife out and cut down the boxes to a smaller size. Just think, only 364 more days and we get to do it all again!