So in our last At Home with The Happiness Bucket, we talked about our keys for decluttering, organizing and decorating. Today, we would like to share with you how we decorate for the various months, to minimize on the amount of décor that is needed in the home…and how we declutter along the way. We will TRY to do this in a systematic way…going month by month…so let’s get started!

September - This is the month that signifies serious football and the start of us switching our house over to a much cozier mood. The weather gets cooler, so you want more blankets available around the house and you inevitably will need to pull a few coats out of storage. Now, we hope that you would have gone through the coats at the end of the season last year, but if you are anything like me, you may have thought oh I can wear that one more season…but then the new season comes and you face the facts of…nope I need to let this go. You also may want to get your coats and blankets washted/cleaned since they have not been used in a while. We also start considering pulling out the flannel sheets…now in most cases this is too early, but who wants to wait until it is supposed to freeze to pull out and wash the flannel sheets??? Remember plan ahead.

What about the time…it also changes so it makes sense to change batteries, clocks and timers in the house to coincide with the time and it getting darker earlier. You want to make sure to check your fire extinguisher levels and your fire alarm to ensure the batteries are up to date. Close the vents to the basement/crawl space of your home and also winterize your irrigation system and pipes.

Most pumpkin patches start around this time and the trees begin to change so that helps guide our decorating. We add decorations that bring out more of the autumn colors - reds, oranges, greens and browns. To decorate we use many inexpensive items…fake leaves and potpourri, pumpkins and scarecrows. We put out our fall tablescape as well, which includes changing the placemats and napkins (scored during the Dillard’s New Year’s Day sale). In our home, we really didn’t have to take down any of our day to day decorations because we don’t really decorate for the other seasons of the year. We might shift statues or photos around, but all in all it is just about adding items.

October - I will preference this by saying I don’t like having ghoulish items such as witches and vampires in our home. I do however want to embrace my husband’s culture and educate our daughter regarding the day of the dead celebration __________. So, I decided we would begin collecting pumpkins and happy scarecrows to put out as well as sugar skulls and photos that remind us of people who have passed on. These items are just added to the décor I put out in September.

November is when we remove the items added in October and add more of the cornucopia’s and turkeys.

December of course (really The weekend after Thanksgiving) we remove all the fall items and add the Holiday items.

I wanted to take a minute and suggest a 30 minute declutter…ok this one may take a little longer but it is the perfect time to start the process. See Holiday decluttering is one that we don’t do often enough…these are the items that hold the most memories in them…this is where Clutter tends to come to stay and it is ok because they represent memories of your life…right?!?!? Well…really that is a big ol’ cop out that we need to stop…

My family loves the holidays…we have big traditions around Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have now also started my collection of pumpkins for the Fall decorations which go up in September. We don’t really celebrate halloweeen, but I do acknowledge it but with pumpkins and not with ghoulish characters. My husband is also from Mexico, so we will begin a celebration of dia des maurtos for my daughter so she will understand her culture and the meaning of the day in the right way.

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<strong>End of the Season Sales</strong>

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So in the first post of this series (enter link here) we mentioned that we would discuss End of the Season Sales in more detail.