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Dear Miriam,
When I took out my Passover dishes this year, I found years’ worth of my kids’ Hebrew school crafts. They’re taking up precious storage space and are not really usable for anything, but I can’t seem to throw them out. What’s the right balance here?
Signed,
Craft Collection
Dear Collection,
Surely you have years’ worth of crafts of all kinds in your house, some you’ve kept and some you haven’t. How do you make any such decision? Apply the same logic here. You can keep a representative sample, but surely not everything. Some things are worth the space and others aren’t. Some can be photographed or just remembered, some can be stored to look at lovingly from year to year and, despite your assertion, in this case, some can be used.
I encourage you to involve your kids in the discussion. What items do they remember making? Do they have fond feelings and want to keep particular pieces? If possible, you should separate your sentimentality from your kids’, and if they don’t want to keep something, you, too, can try to let it go. If they do want to keep something that you don’t, maybe hang onto it until they have a home of their own and then pass it along for them to use or keep or store as they see fit.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping things just for the sake of keeping them, either, within reason. Designate one bin or one shelf and allow yourself to fill it. Enjoy the nostalgia that this once-a-year Passover memory lane gives you.
Not everything has to be useful, but I challenge you to find some things that could be. You don’t need a fancy afikomen cover; the preschool version will work just fine. Plague puppets just need to get the point across. Elijah doesn’t need a silver goblet; a plastic cup featuring your kid’s handwriting works just as well. You can also just put these things on the table as decorations or hang them from the walls. People, from what I understand, have a variety of types of Christmas ornaments representing different stages of their family’s life, so why not use these crafts to evoke a similar vibe? And if anything gets broken or covered in wine, you can throw them away knowing they got a last hurrah.
Be well,
Miriam
