When Christmas Leaves but the Mess Stays

Good news: Christmas is over. We can all officially move on from the shopping, wrapping, baking, and the endless list of obligations that somehow sneak in under the guise of “holiday cheer.”

Bad news: My house looks like Christmas checked out but left all its belongings behind.

Gifts are scattered around the house because—surprise—we don’t actually have places for them yet. Laundry is camped out on the sofa, waiting patiently to be folded and put away. The guest room is buried under boxes that need to be packed up with decorations and stored until next year. And then there are the regular tasks—the dusting, sweeping, mopping, and all the little things that quietly keep a house feeling livable—that have been ignored for the past couple of weeks.

I woke up this morning, took one look around, and very seriously considered crawling back into bed… despite the small inconvenience of it being a workday.

After a quick pep talk (the kind where you talk to yourself like a coach who is equal parts encouraging and disappointed), I decided it was time to recruit—also known as voluntell—Iyan that he was officially on duty to help restore order. Ray was alerted shortly after that the long “to-do” list needed to become a “done” list. Just saying it out loud made the day feel a little less overwhelming.

I know these are minor issues in the grand scheme of life, but sometimes it’s not the difficulty of the tasks—it’s the sheer volume of them that feels paralyzing. When there’s so much to do, it’s hard to know where to start.

So I started upstairs.

The method to my madness was simple: my mom is coming next week, and I didn’t want to trigger her asthma by making her sleep in a dusty guest room. From there, Iyan’s room was next since it’s right next door. I made a sort of round-robin loop through the upstairs bedrooms—no grand plan, just forward motion.

I’m not finished, and that’s fine. The house is still mid-reset, the laundry is still judging me from the sofa, and Christmas may or may not be fully packed away. But things are moving in the right direction — and that feels like a win. Sometimes progress doesn’t look like perfection. Sometimes it just looks like not crawling back into bed.

Question:
Do you give yourself a little grace during the post-holiday reset, or do you power through until everything is back in its place?

With love & a little glitter,
Valerie ✨