A couple of Christmases ago, a friend bought me this tin. Not being known for someone who was an excessive shopper, I wasn’t overly enamoured of it at first. But then as life inevitably created receipts in my pockets, backpack, side table, everywhere, it made sense to use it for its intended purpose.
At first, it was just a small useful object that I cleared out when it was full and the receipts had expired past their usefulness, every couple of months or so. This morning, as it had reached its capacity, I figured it was time for another slightly dull shredding session.
But for once, it was actually rather nice.
I found:
- Receipts from straight after the last clear out dating back to January.
- Evidence of presents I had bought which weren’t just stuff, but things I had put time into choosing that I thought would bring more joy to the receivers – books, experiences, concerts.
- Receipts from cafes and trips from our gorgeous summer holiday in Slovenia.
- Just two dresses.
- My one big splurge, a beekeeping suit.
- And the vast majority of the rest were food receipts from greengrocers, delis and other little food shops.
This is clearly not an exciting, dramatic, life changing story (if you’ve stayed awake long enough to get to this point, thank you). But it helped me realise that my plan to declutter, downsize and streamline my life is actually working, and that it’s not nearly so annoying a process doing it once every nine months!
So for showing me that, little tin, you have made me very happy indeed.
But the little tin has been part of those changes, so of course it deserves some recognition! It did make you feel good, so why not share it with us? 🙂 PS: Receipts are the worst!
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Yes, I must apologise to my little tin! And you’re right, receipts are annoying tiny bits of clutter – I’m sure I remember years ago seeing a tv programme that said one day we would just be able to beep our phones in shops and have receipts emailed to us instead. I guess that’s also digital clutter though!
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We have a sports shop and a garden shop in town that keeps customers’ receipts in their computer systems instead of printing them out. On the one hand we are dependent on the technology to hang on to them for us, but on the other it is kind of nice leaving a store without a receipt. Very few stores have the option of simply not printing one.
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It would be interesting to know if the carbon footprint of printing is higher than the footprint of the technology!
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Now there’s some food for thought!
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Love the tin – what a great idea!
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Thanks Kathryn! It really did feel like a review of the year in changing habits – one empty in 10 months much better than every two 🙂
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