Well, this is fascinating! Self-storage services are billing their units as "Santa Closets," renting for $1/day, to help people hide their gifts from family members! Gifts are really hard to hide if you don’t have extra storage space in your homes. Here is an article about this from the Houston Chronicle. To be fair, some really large gifts would be hard for anyone to hide, such as bikes or big screen TVs. But what about hiding it at a neighbor’s house? I wonder if the Santa Closets also reflect a trend toward being less neighborly.
So our gifts are getting bigger and our houses are getting bigger too, with the average size home growing over 650 square feet in the last 30 years. Yet, our average family size is smaller, from 3.1 people in 1974 to 2.6 people in 2004. (ABC News) So we have fewer people living in much bigger space, yet we still have storage problems. Maybe we need to go on a clutter diet! 😉
Merry Christmas!
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