The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Early Boxing Day

Bags of clothes to give awayI'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.

Want to simplify your life?  Read our ebook and learn to work for yourself.


Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

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.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.


Is that a lemon tree in the background? I've been babying a Meyer lemon for 10 years now. No flowering, no fruit, just a beautiful tree that gets bigger and frustrates me more and more each year.
Comment by Fostermamas Fri Dec 11 21:17:20 2009





profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.