According to old Chinese custom, New Year’s eve is an ideal time to clean your home. Doing so may rid the bad luck of your previous year.

Just for fun we decided to integrate this custom into our own Chinese New Year celebration. This way we’d be able to knock off two to-do’s on our list: 1) Celebrate Chinese New Year & 2) Organize our closet. How’s that for being auspiciously efficient?

If you’d like to read about our Chinese New Year’s festivities, you can click right there.

Otherwise, back to the closet. Our train-wreck of a closet. Years of stuff from our lives lived separate and apart, merged together in a haphazard explosion. High school trinkets, report cards, bad teenager poetry. University papers, old notebooks, broken cd cases. Books! Why do we have so many books? Random art from random artists who never picked up their work. (If you’re reading this and your stuff is in my closest, please get in touch). X-Mas decorations, strings of lights, a broken blow-up mattress, crutches, an exercise ball and a space heater.

Call me a sentimental girl, but I couldn’t part with a lot of it. The bad poetry. The old letters. The trinkets. Even the broken cd cases. They’re relics. All of them. And not just relics of my past; relics of our collective past. Who writes letters on paper anymore? Who buys CD’s? There’s this whole new generation out there listening to invisible music and texting their paper-less insights. What will their closets look like in ten years, I wonder?

Overall it took us approximately three hours of sifting, digging, chucking, re-arranging and building shelves. Most of the time was spent in laughter going down memory lane. It feels good to get our old lives organized, safely preserved, and integrated into our new lives.

Now I feel we can officially begin this exciting year ahead of us. Happy Chinese New Year!