Even when you keep your own Christmas fairly simple, kids get really wound up around all the presents they get at Christmas time. If you’re like me and have a lot of family giving presents, it can be hard to control just what happens.

With the new year, kids need to recover from getting so much fun new stuff and really taking a look at what they have that they really don’t care about.

This is the time of year to go through the old toys and get rid of any that aren’t really played with if you didn’t do that before Christmas. Send them off to charity. Teach your kids about giving to those who have less!

Honestly, my kids resist the clean out and then love giving the toys away. I don’t hide the process from them at all. I could, very easily. Especially this year with so many of their toys still boxed away in the garage.

But I don’t do that because it’s a great lesson.

They get to do the first sort, which is to get the toys they are absolutely not interested in keeping into the give away pile.

Then comes the challenging sort, when my husband and I get to decide if they’re keeping things we know they really won’t use. This one generates a number of protests often followed by an admission that yes, it’s really not used that much. But it’s special, you see! And they just know that they’ll start using it more soon!

That plea works some of the time but not that often.

We don’t aim for tears or a lot of frustration or anything, and it rarely goes that badly. Talking about the children with very few toys who might be able to get their old toys works pretty well. Children can be amazingly sympathetic if you play it right.