Let me start by saying I don’t mean to sound like a Grinch here. I absolutely love Christmas and love the thoughtful gifts we receive from friends and family. I know that nobody has to give us a single thing and that they do so out of their love for our family.  And I truly appreciate that love.

But sometimes the gift itself is a bit more problematic.

Over the past few years, I have been really working to declutter our home and get rid of a lot of the excess stuff. I am by no means a mimimalist (which you could attest to if you saw our basement!). But a few years ago, I realized that we were drowning in stuff that we really didn’t need or necessarily want. The mere thought of possibly moving one day and having to sort through everything made me feel exhausted. So we started majorly decluttering. We got rid of boxes and boxes of things that we didn’t love or need. I definitely didn’t go to the extremes of the popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but we made some really good progress.

As a part of that process, I learned that the best way to escape the crush of clutter is to buy less stuff to begin with. But when it’s gift-giving season, all that changes. We have no control over the gifts other people give us. And while most of the gifts our family receives are wonderful and much appreciated, nobody is perfect and there are definitely gifts that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves. Toys with dozens of tiny parts just waiting to be lost and broken. Clothes that are not our style. Loud, annoying toys. And stuff we just downright don’t need.

Even though Christmas hasn’t actually come yet, this recently came up when we were visiting my in-laws. My mother-in-law found a great deal on a Keurig at a Black Friday sale and bought one for us. Definitely a fantastic, thoughtful gift. The problem is my husband is the only one who drinks coffee in our house and he brews it using a French press, which is super easy, takes up no counter space, and can use any type of coffee – including his favorite: freshly ground.

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So now we have this big Keurig, except we don’t actually need it, it takes up a ton of space on the counter, and the coffee is much more expensive than what we usually buy. My husband tried to tell his mom tactfully that we really didn’t need it, but she really wanted to give it to us anyway. She mentioned that he can use it when he wants a change and she can use it whenever she visits. So now we have to have a space for it since she will be wanting to use it when she visits!

At first, I was pretty frustrated, but then a few days later I was listening to the podcast, The Art of Simple, and the host Tsh shared her philosophy on handling gifts you don’t need or want. Her philosophy is to always put people over things. That can mean a lot of different things in different situations, but in the case of unwanted gifts, I think it means putting the person who gave the gift above the usefulness of the gift itself.

No, we don’t need a Keurig. But my mother-in-law gave it to us out of love and that should count for something. And as much as I want to get all the unnecessary stuff out of my house, my desire to declutter isn’t more important than my relationship with family. Of course, every circumstance is different. It helps that we have a pretty good-sized kitchen, so there is technically space. It also helps that we only see our in-laws every other month or so, and we aren’t constantly receiving a huge influx of unneeded stuff.

So this is the standard I’m going to use from now on: People over stuff. If my kids absolutely love the junky toy with a dozen tiny parts, they can play with to their heart’s content. And then when all the pieces are lost and they lose interest, I can toss it. Or when they get clothes I really hate from someone I love, there’s no reason they can’t be play clothes we just wear at home.

That’s my plan anyway. How do you handle unwanted gifts?