220: A Little Jolt of Joy – The Gift of Nostalgia

Your Kids Deserve Nostalgia: A Snow Day, Some Craft Supplies, and Use It or Lose It

I’m recording this hoping tomorrow brings a snow day. I live north of Atlanta, where snow is rare enough that the whole idea of one is its own kind of event, and my daughter is buzzing with the possibility of it.

What a snow day used to mean

I grew up in the mountains of Maryland, in a heavy snow area, and I still remember the particular anticipation of waiting to hear whether school would be called off. We didn’t have the instant communication kids have now. We listened to the radio, waited by the phone, and I had the odd advantage of my mom working at the Board of Education, so our house sometimes got the call before anyone else’s. When a snow day actually happened, it felt like an honest-to-goodness gift, a bonus day where nothing counted and every plan got happily dashed. We’d bundle up, go out, get soaked and cold, come in, thaw out, and go back out again, dragging snow gear in and out of a house with no mudroom the entire time.

It struck me recently that kids today could turn a snow day into just another digital school day, still logging on, still doing assignments. And something in me rebelled at that. Kids deserve nostalgia. They deserve the chance to feel plans dashed through no fault or effort of their own, and the pure freeness of an unplanned day.

Use it or lose it, as a decluttering question

I was recently listening to a Gretchen Rubin podcast where she talked about “use it or lose it,” originally about muscles or brainpower, but she applied it to local community resources too: go support that farmer’s market or local museum, or eventually it won’t be there to use. It struck me as a genuinely useful decluttering question as well. So often when I’m decluttering with clients, I hear “I’m saving this for someday” or “this is special to me,” and then it turns out to have been hidden in a box, forgotten. If something is truly that special, the challenge is to actually use it, not just protect it. Otherwise, it’s not being saved for a rainy day, it’s being lost to one.

My own overstuffed art cabinets

In my own house, after four kids and years of new school supplies and school projects, I have a genuinely ridiculous surplus of construction paper, glue sticks, and stickers, all beautifully organized and taking up the bottom halves of two full bookshelves. I have one child left at home, a senior in high school. There is no reasonable chance I need two full cabinets of art supplies anymore.

So if you get a snow day, or any unplanned day with restless kids on your hands, here’s the move: once they’ve frozen themselves outside, come in, had a snack, and started bouncing off the walls, drag out every bit of that art stash. The Play-Doh, the paints, all the things you’ve been unconsciously saving for some undefined future occasion. Let them go wild and creative with it. If they find a dead marker, have them toss it right then. Challenge them to make one big picture that uses every single marker color you own at least once, so the dried-out ones get caught and thrown away in the process.

The part that actually gets hard

Here’s where it gets trickier than just decluttering supplies: now you’re holding a house full of art your kids are attached to and proudly displaying everywhere, and you’re the one who has to eventually deal with letting go of children’s artwork, which always comes with its own guilt.

Give yourself permission to make me the villain here if you need to: call it snow day art, and snow day art melts when the snow melts. Leave it up while the snow’s still on the ground. Once it’s gone and the kids are back in school, take it down and let it go, trusting that the nostalgia itself, the memory of the day, is what actually stays.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.