it never stops
This year Hannukah and Christmas overlapped, and so—unusually—we got to do the former with the Bernsteins after the latter with the Archibalds. It was very pleasant, but I have to say that Harvey's present haul is now beginning to exceed the capacity of our house to encompass it. Not that I'm complaining about any of the individual presents themselves, of course; the latest batch includes several items that will be very useful for keeping him occupied while we do other things. He's now the proud owner of a play kitchen, for example, as well as a CD player—the only one in the house!—and a set of read-aloud albums. (There's more to say about how, in the absence of television, he enjoys hearing spoken word audio—he's wearing out "Peter and the Wolf", or would be if digital audio files could show wear—but that's the subject of another post.)
The problem is just that we don't have that much room. The play kitchen is much smaller than I feared it would be, but it still has a footprint of several square feet that we'll have to accommodate somewhere, and the train-and-car basket was already full before having to hold a further four trains and six cars. Keep in mind that we don't have a playroom, particularly: all this stuff has to fit in the space that we need to live in.
Of course, I'm saying this as someone who refuses to get rid of any books and indeed would like to continue to add to the number in the house, acquiring more bookshelves as necessary to hold them. Clearly, we all have something to learn from the Adamses! But we Archibalds like our stuff, so we'll see if we can improve our organization before we have to resort to desperate tactics like giving things away. Although, ask me again how I feel about getting rid of things after the 32nd time through the audiobook of Curious George; maybe adding some headphones would be a proactive step in that case.