I have a clutter question for you. Letters to Santa: keep or toss? Are they worth keeping if you can’t find prior years?
Clutter Question: Letters to Santa
Pancakes & French Fries
phenomenally indecisive since 1972
Pancakes & French Fries
phenomenally indecisive since 1972
I have a clutter question for you. Letters to Santa: keep or toss? Are they worth keeping if you can’t find prior years?
I vote keep. We have a family album for pictures and scraps, and it's the perfect storage spot for this type of memorabilia. I envision flipping through the album in thirty years and coming across that second-grade handwriting.
I'm in the no camp, unless the letter is terribly touching or funny. I volunteer at my younger two's school, and one of the things I did this year was frame all the Santa letters from the primary grades for display in the classrooms. One kid wrote "dear Santa, I tried to be good this year but people just make mad." That I would have kept. I threw out my own kiddos' Santa letters.
I take pictures of ours next to the milk and cookies the night before…one less piece of paper!
I usually snap a picture before we mail them.
We mail ours … to Santa, and we get a reply! The employees at Canada Post reply to as many Santa letters as they can. It's awesome and before we mail it, I take a picture!
Are you serious? Keep, keep, keep!
scan them, then toss.
Take a picture or scan them. Toss the original. What are you or they going to do with it 30 years from now? Frame it? A picture works just as well for that.
I had the same dilemma and kept them in an album I got at Moto-photo. I think I added the Santa pictures to the album. We had letters to Santa and Santa always answered the letters. Plus some years the Easter Bunny was in on the action,Far too adorable to pitch. But the question remains if the unsentimental generation we seem to be raising will give a hoot about all this stuff.
Maybe have them decide (now or later) whether they want to keep them or not …
I kept ours year after year hidden in my nightstand (couldn't put them in the photo albums, because the kids would see them and ask why they weren't sent to Santa!) Last summer we sold our house and got rid of most of our possessions (we are now living in Germany and didn't ship any of our things to our new home.) I packed up the letters and gave them to my (now young adult) kids as we traveled to a family reunion. We had so much fun reading them and talking about them! In the end, I asked whether we should continue to keep them or toss them, and the unanimous answer was to keep – so off to storage with the photo albums they went! The kids were THRILLED to see their own handwriting, their drawings, their wishes and thank you's, and the things they thought Santa should know about their behavior that year. KEEP.
Keep. I have a couple that my parents saved and they are fun to look back on. They stay in the bottom of the decoration bin, flat in a bag, and the girls giggle over my requests. I hope they 'll do the same with their kids with the ones we have stashed in the hubby's office. Its a great snapshot of who they are at the moment.
I would keep them. Not keeping them because you don't have a complete set is perfectionist thinking — something I struggle with but am gently trying to move away from. Have you seen the declutterer whose rule is you only keep it if it brings you joy? So do these letters bring you joy when you look at them?
I don't quite understand the "scan and toss" philosophy. It's already a flat sheet of paper, what space are you saving if you scan it and then print it? If you don't print it, what's the point of scanning it? I feel like I'm missing something.