Don’t Go Landfill Maxing This Holiday Season
I recently learned a new term that made me laugh: landfill maxing.
As far as I can tell, landfill maxing is the practice of looking around your home and thinking, You know what this place needs? More future garbage.
Okay, that may not be the official definition. But you get the idea.
And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, especially when the seasons change.
Plastic pumpkins. Plastic leaves. Plastic skeletons. Plastic Christmas signs. Plastic garlands. Plastic trees covered in plastic glitter. Bins and bins of inexpensive seasonal decorations designed to be exciting for a few weeks and then stored, donated, or thrown away when we’re tired of them.
I love decorating for the holidays. I am absolutely not suggesting we all live in beige houses with one tasteful pinecone on the table.
I’m suggesting the opposite.
I think our homes can be more interesting when we stop treating decorating as shopping.
The Seasonal Stuff Creep
As a professional organizer, I’ve seen how quickly seasonal decorations accumulate.
One Halloween bin becomes three. Christmas gets an entire corner of the garage. There are decorations we don’t particularly like anymore, but we keep them because we bought them. Then every year, stores roll out something new, and it’s easy to bring home a few more things.
And we are buying a lot of this stuff.
The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend about $4.3 billion on Halloween decorations alone in 2026. Seventy-eight percent of Halloween shoppers expect to purchase decorations this year.
That’s a tremendous amount of stuff entering our homes for a holiday that lasts one day.
The good news? We don’t have to stop decorating. We can just decorate differently.
Try “Shopping” Somewhere Else
Before heading to the big-box seasonal aisle, try the thrift store.
Or the antique store. Or an estate sale. Or your grandmother’s attic. Or your own garage.
Vintage holiday decorations have so much more personality than something mass-produced to follow this year’s trend. An old ceramic pumpkin, brass candlesticks, a slightly weird vintage Santa, beautiful baskets, old glass ornaments, pottery, wooden objects and vintage linens can make a home feel collected rather than purchased.
And when you buy something secondhand, you’re not creating demand for another brand-new object to be manufactured. You’re giving an existing object another chapter.
Even better: shop your own house.
That wooden bowl you normally use for fruit? Fill it with miniature pumpkins.
Put branches from the yard in a vase.
Move your brass candlesticks to the mantel.
Fill a basket with pinecones.
Tie ribbon around something you already own.
Suddenly, you have seasonal décor without having to find a permanent home for 17 new objects in January.
Grow Your Decorations
Some of my favorite seasonal decorations aren’t really “decorations” at all.
They’re pumpkins. Gourds. Dried flowers. Branches. Pinecones. Herbs. Evergreens. Dried orange slices. Apples. Pomegranates. Cinnamon sticks.
If you have a garden, and had the foresight to think about this sometime before October, you can even grow some of your own!
There is something wonderfully satisfying about decorating your house with a pumpkin you grew yourself, and then, when the season is over, letting it become something else.
Eat it. Feed appropriate scraps to animals. Save the seeds. Compost it.
The EPA calls composting “nature’s way of recycling,” and that’s exactly what I love about it. Instead of an object sitting in a landfill for years, organic material can eventually become something that nourishes soil. Composting also keeps organic waste out of landfills, where decomposition produces methane.
A pumpkin that becomes next year’s garden soil has had a pretty good life.
Buy the Holiday Decorations You Want to Keep
Of course, not everything has to be compostable or secondhand.
Sometimes you see a Christmas ornament or Halloween decoration that makes you ridiculously happy.
Buy it!
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is being more intentional.
Instead of buying ten inexpensive decorations because they’re cute and they’re $4.99 each, perhaps buy one thing you really love, something you’ll be excited to unpack ten years from now.
That’s actually an organizing principle I come back to again and again:
The less stuff you bring into your home casually, the less stuff you have to make decisions about later.
Everything you own eventually asks something of you.
Where will I live?
Where will you store me?
Will you clean me?
Will you pack me?
Will you move me?
Will you donate me?
Will you throw me away?
One little plastic pumpkin isn’t a problem. But multiply those tiny decisions by every holiday, every season, every year, and suddenly you’re standing in your garage wondering why you own 14 bins labeled “HOLIDAY.”
Make Decorating Creative Again
I think there’s another benefit to stepping away from disposable seasonal décor: it makes decorating creative again.
What can you make?
What can you grow?
What can you find secondhand?
What do you already have?
What can you bring in from nature?
What beloved decorations do you look forward to seeing every year?
Those questions create homes with stories.
Maybe your fall centerpiece is a thrifted wooden bowl filled with pumpkins from your garden. Maybe your Christmas ornaments are a mixture of family heirlooms, handmade pieces and treasures you’ve collected while traveling. Maybe you cut greenery from your yard instead of buying another plastic garland.
It doesn’t have to look like a catalog.
It can look like you.
And when January comes around, you won’t have nearly as much stuff to organize and store.
Less Landfill Maxing, More Meaning
I’m not interested in making anyone feel guilty for buying a plastic ghost at Target.
Life is hard enough.
But I do think it’s worth noticing how often we’re encouraged to celebrate by buying more things.
The holidays are supposed to give us rhythm. They connect us with seasons, traditions, food, family, friends, memories and our homes.
We don’t need a cart full of brand-new stuff to create that feeling.
This year, before you buy another seasonal decoration, ask yourself:
Do I love this enough to store it for the other 11 months of the year?
If the answer is yes, bring that glorious weird little Christmas reindeer home.
If the answer is no?
Leave it for someone else.
Your closets, your garage, and the landfill, will thank you.
Posted By Jean Prominski, Certified Professional Organizer
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