Memorabilia

[peanut]

I must admit, I spent part of yesterday staring at two boxes of memorabilia in my dining room, wondering what to do with it. It represents 10 years of scrapbooking that I'll never get around to. I have another box under my bed of childhood memorabilia. What does one do with this stuff?

How do you all deal with this stuff? Do you toss it? Organize it somehow? Make time to scrapbook it? What?

[Spirit Deer]

It's a dilemma. I try not to get emotionally attached to stuff but some attachment is inevitable. The best I've been able to do is pare it down, but can't seem to let go of everything completely.

[VanVivCam]

I know what you mean. I have tons of stuff I just don't know what to do with it. My hubby put down flooring in our attic and I purchased those plastic tubs to store things up there.

Good luck! Now, if you want to get rid of your extra scrapbooking stuff, just let me know

[zakity]

Take pictures of it and recycle it/donate it/trash it.

[Contrary Housewife]

My mom just sent me a bunch of stuff from grade school. So I suppose the thing to do when you can't stand having it around is to send it to your offspring.

I'm afraid she's going to send my father's grade school papers soon, too. *shudder*.

[nuisance26]

My mom just sent me a bunch of stuff from grade school. So I suppose the thing to do when you can't stand having it around is to send it to your offspring.

I'm afraid she's going to send my father's grade school papers soon, too. *shudder*.

~She sent her own grade school stuff? Ok that's not cool.
Peanut, I've given this a lot of thought over the last year because I want to get a handle on this now while the kids are young. I decided to journal my keepsake items. Large items will be photographed and small items will be put into the book. I will write a few lines about what the item meant to me or how I got it or used it. I'll just use a standard 12x12 scrapbook with lightly patterned paper and photo corners to mount the pics and journal entries. This is my Winter project. If I just write two blurbs a day and assemble the pages in an hour on the weekends I will have an amazing scrapbook at the end of the season. Not all scrapbooking needs to be fancy and time intensive.
If my project goes well I'll tackle the kids' stuff I've been saving. I have actually started that already with their baby clothes. ~

[Debbie-cat]

I know what you are dealing with peanut. I have a ton of stuff of ds's that I am trying to decide what to do with. I like nuisance idea though. Maybe I will do the same.

[MissSeetonFan]

If possible, scan it, then you can decide whether to toss it.

Another idea came from my mom today. She brought up a bunch of old Christmas and other cards. So my kids turned them into decorations for Christmas. We traced circles, squares and triangles and punched holes in them after cutting them out. Hung them up with yarn. Inexpensive ornaments. So have grandkids or others help do something like that.

I'm going to go through old piles of cards for the same thing.

I think it also depends on the type of memorabilia. I'm looking into recycling old trophies and medals because they don't mean much to me anymore. Maybe I could make a few bucks off of the brass and bronze parts.

Papers, I toss all but one or two representative things of an era. Then, when I scan, I may toss those too.

Letters, I keep. I eventually want to type them up. Same with pictures. I keep. But then I have kept a journal steadily for almost 16 years and off and on for years before that, so written records of things are important to me.

[monkeywrangler71]

I just go through it, toss some stuff, and put the rest in a box and shove it somewhere. Then about 5 years later I do it again. In fact, I was just thinking about going through the stuff I have now, except I really don't have time (probably another of my Christmas avoidance schemes).

Every time I go through it, less and less of it still seems important. Fifteen years ago I had a trunk filled with keepsake papers, now I have about 1/2 a filing box.

[peanut]

Thanks everyone. I talked to a friend today and she is going to give me some binders she's not using. I'm going to buy a big box of the acid free plastic sleeves and sit down for a massive sorting party. If I want to keep it and scrapbook it some day, I'm going to put it in a sleeve in the binder. Otherwise it's photo time or garbage time.

Right now I'm just dealing with paper stuff. However I have become the family repository for antiques and such as well. I've amassed quite a collection of textiles as well. I'm wanting to photograph those and make a binder labeling them all. So if anything happens to me at least the girls will know what they are.

I am currently photographing all the jewelry in the house and making documents of them for the girls on the computer. I think I've finished all the antiques otherwise.

You know, it would be so much better if I could hire an interior designer to just come in and look at my stuff, put together a nice look, and then I could gift the rest to my poor unsuspecting daughters. Or maybe my nieces.

[monkeywrangler71]

Be careful that you don't just end up with a giant pile of stuff and a giant pile of photos of stuff.

Purge ruthlessly before cataloguing things. Cataloguing is a perfectionist desire that will usually just get in the way of actually getting anything done. I have the same urge, but it's counter productive - there is not enough time in life to catalogue everything, you can never put everything in order. Don't focus on perfect, you will only get stuck.

Also, the massive sorting party - again you're aiming for huge and probably setting yourself up for failure as it will likely take significantly longer than you anticipate. I see more perfectionist thinking here - big plans, big projects, super organized, perfect.

Ask the girls if they actually care about any of this stuff. What's the point of saving, preserving and cataloguing stuff for someone who doesn't even want it? Just because things have been passed on to you does not obligate you to save them. Make sure that YOU actually care about these things - if you don't then give them to someone who does, regardless of how they came to you.

[Spirit Deer]

Ask the girls if they actually care about any of this stuff. What's the point of saving, preserving and cataloguing stuff for someone who doesn't even want it? Just because things have been passed on to you does not obligate you to save them. Make sure that YOU actually care about these things - if you don't then give them to someone who does, regardless of how they came to you.

This is excellent advice. It took me a long time to reach that conclusion, and to realize I'm not obligated to keep everything given to me, much to my mother's horror.

She's leaving me all her jewelry and all her antique dishes. I already plan to unload most of the dishes and quite a bit of the jewelry, but of course I'm not telling her that. It's not because of the value, although this stuff is valuable. It's because I don't have room for it and don't have anyone to pass it on to. To be honest, I wish she'd sell a bunch of it herself and enjoy the money rather than leaving it for me to deal with.

My mom clings to everything she has that my grandma had. It makes no sense to me to cherish things the person you got it from never cherished. Grandma just owned the stuff. Most of it never meant anything at all to her. I don't want to be like that.

[peanut]

Good points ladies. MW: how did you know I have a closet trait of perfectionism? OK, not so closet.

I decided to sort through the linens and anything in less than pristine condition is going to be either tossed or cut up for a crazy quilt (I have a box collecting stuff for one).

I wear the jewelery so the girls are going to have to go through it after I die. I've told them to be on good terms with their nieces and nephews so they can gift to them. Funny, my nieces and nephews parents seem to want them to have the stuff more than my girls want it. I don't think the younger generation really is enamoured with old lady jewelry somehow. Their parents are all saying 'wait till they're older.' Hmm...some of them are already in their mid-20s!

Actually, we just went through asking the girls what they wanted if we died. We redid our wills last month.

[BlissMommy]

I scrapbook it and just make sure it is organized to do it when I have time.

[shoiji]

Remember my grandmother asking everyone in the family what piece of furniture they wanted in her house. We were supposed to tell her and then she would put our names on the piece. So in her final years when we would go to her house there were pieces of paper with names on different things throughout the house. So as you are photographing the items you might want to put a name on specific items that you think a family member wants or would like.

While it was difficult at times to see the names on things (because it meant the end may be near) it definately left out any bickering about who gets what.

Hope you can get some good purging and organizing done.