Easter is coming! Are you already thinking about what gifts to get your kids for Easter? Easter baskets seem to be getting a little out of control lately.
Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and you’ll see plenty of influencers sharing their kids’ baskets filled with expensive gifts like jewelry, gift cards, and gaming consoles.
If extravagant baskets aren’t your thing, big box stores sell a plethora of egg fillers, Easter-themed toys, and plenty of plastic junk to fill your child’s basket to the brim. But is this really the best option?
TikToker KC Davis (@domesticblisters) has a great idea for parents who want their kids to have a pretty Easter basket but don’t want it to be cluttered with stuff. She calls it her “no-clutter Easter basket.”
This is for all the parents who love to spoil their kids during the holidays but don’t want a lot of clutter at home and stress at the end of the day.
Davis, author of How to Maintain a Household When You’re Drowning and host of the Struggling to Care podcast, is a licensed professional therapist who helps people dealing with mental health issues, physical illnesses, and difficult times in their lives find practical approaches to caring for themselves and their families.
“Hi, I’m a mom and my goal this year is to keep Easter baskets simple and neat,” Davis said. “Because I’m the type of person who loves to overfill my Easter basket, and I also hate Easter baskets that are full of little plastic bags and extra toys.”
Instead of plastic eggs, bunny ears, and other small plastic toys that will end up in the trash or junk pile, she chooses items that the kids need to replace, like a new box of crayons, water bottles, and bathing suits. That way, she doesn’t have to buy anything—she just buys a few spares. Kill two birds with one stone!
She then placed some edible items in the basket. “They’re both getting a chocolate bunny. My kids always ask for cake. So there’s cake mix, frosting, some little decorations and sprinkles that will go in their Easter basket,” she explained, holding up the items.
“I’m really excited because they see it and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that means we’re going to bake a cake today.’”
The idea is brilliant and simple – the cake mix will fill the children’s baskets and be eaten the same day.
The last thing Davis put in the basket were fun accessories that kids could “use.” So it satisfies the needs of most kids who want toys in their baskets, but these toys are quickly thrown away after use.
The average American household has over 300,000 items, and with holidays like Christmas and Easter approaching, there’s no end in sight to the amount of clutter we bring home. The home improvement industry has boomed in the last two years, with $1.2 trillion spent on unnecessary items each year.
According to Psychology Today, clutter overstimulates our visual, olfactory, and tactile systems, exhausting our senses and making it difficult to relax. We are constantly reminded of our to-do lists, which makes us anxious because the thought of sorting and organizing things becomes overwhelming.
Scientists have even found that having too many household items may have more serious long-term health consequences for women than for men.
“When we have too much stuff, it becomes clutter, and we’ve shown that that has an impact on households,” said Joseph R. Ferrari, one of the study’s authors.
Clutter is bad for relationships. Life is not about people, it’s about things, and relationships are what give us a sense of belonging. We identify with our things, but when a home is cluttered, it can ruin it in a very destructive way. Most people have a positive attitude towards home, but we show its negative, dark side.
Davis’s “no clutter, minimal clutter” approach to Easter baskets is the perfect compromise for parents who still want to keep the magic of Easter but don’t want the mental and physical clutter of new things accumulating in their home.