2017. And, so it begins. The kids are back in school, we are back to work, and Christmas break is starting to feel like it never even happened. I started December with an ambitious to-do list. Most of it was holiday related, and got checked off by necessity.

An enormous home improvement project that took up most of the Wonderful Husband's weekends for the past six months, the replacement of a three-story porch, was finally completed. The rest of my list had to do with major clean-out projects that were long overdue.Our home is blessed with ample storage space. While this is one of the things that initially hooked me when we were thinking of buying the place, I have come to regret it mightily. Case in point: the boys' room. Over the last year, I have tried to transition cleaning responsibilities, including things like vacuuming, bed making, and putting laundry away, to the boys. At 8 and 10, I felt that they really could handle cleaning a room. It should be noted that G made his bed once, and for the last year has been sleeping in his sleeping bag on the floor so that he can avoid ever having to make it again. I really should have taken that as a sign that things were not as they appeared.Initially, I helped them, trying to supervise and direct them to get them to understand "cleaning." After I thought they got the hang of it, they were sent off to clean their room, while I worked on the other parts of the house.A few hours later, I would come in with the vacuum cleaner and vacuum, and it looked great. I should have gotten suspicious when various articles of clothing started to disappear. I had purchased athletic turtlenecks for the boys to wear under their baseball uniforms in the early season when evening games could turn quite cool. They made a few appearances, and then I started to notice that G wasn't wearing one anymore, despite the fact that it was still pretty chilly.I should have gotten suspicious when the closet door wasn't quite closing. But a lot of the doorways in our ancient house are no longer plumb, and as humidity increases during the summer months, a lot of doors don't quite close at all.Finally, though, when their school clothing started disappearing, I couldn't ignore the warning signs anymore. Yes, for several months, the little hoarders had been shoving everything on the floor of their room into the grandiose closets.And, I, wanting to believe that my little angels were capable of being responsible and keeping a clean room, turned a blind eye.It was ugly. I'm sad to say that I had to sacrifice several vacation days to the grand clean-out. While they were at school, I was ruthless, throwing away every broken toy, boxing up every outgrown book, turning old T-shirts into dust rags. When they got home from school, there was a mountain of assorted stuff for them to put away in an organized manner. Anything left by the next day was going into the Goodwill bin or the garbage. There was much screaming and crying and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes, it was even the kids doing it.It took all month, but finally, I think we have achieved order and threats have been made about returning to the state of war zone.It's a good thing that this clean-out happened right before Christmas, because I made it very clear to Santa that we had downsized and we were planning to stay downsized, and Santa really cooperated. I was a little concerned about potential disappointment on Christmas morning, but maybe due to some post-traumatic stress over the whole cleaning debacle, the kids were still overwhelmed with excitement on Christmas morning and pronounced it the best Christmas ever.Lesson learned! My kids truly don't look for "things" to make them happy.I'm not one to make many New Year's resolutions, but I think we are going to have a year of downsizing.I'm glad that the kids are on board with donating the toys that have survived their childhoods in good shape to others who need it, whether it's a friend, a preschool or the Goodwill bin. They've also been happy to pass on books that they have outgrown, even the ones that look slightly less than new. Which is just about all of them. We are hard on books in our house.As I held the boys to their indentured servitude, I asked them what kinds of things they'd rather be doing.G eventually got around to the conclusion that if he didn't have so much stuff, he wouldn't have to spend so much time taking care of it. I think in that moment, he would have happily divested himself of every earthly possession, except maybe his fishing tackle.While I'm not ready to go to that extreme yet, I do hope that we're on a path to "less is more" where having less stuff gives us more time to spend together making memories that we can hang on to forever.Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.