The Brave Little Toaster

Did you ever watch The Brave Little Toaster as a child? It was a favorite for me - I watched it dozens of times. If you have not seen it you missed out.

Here is the plot - taken from Wikipedia:

Five appliances — a radio (Radio), a lamp (Lampy), an electric blanket (Blanky), a vacuum cleaner (Kirby), and a toaster (Toaster) — wake up and await their "Master", a child whom they have not seen for many years, with a growing sense of abandonment. The paranoid Air Conditioner, jealous of the affection given to the other appliances by the Master, is provoked into overheating and short-circuits. When a car stops at the cabin and turns out to be a real estate broker placing a "for sale" sign, the appliances spiral into despair. Unable to accept that the Master would abandon them, Toaster decides that the group should head out and find the Master. The appliances rigs up a car battery to an office chair pulled by Kirby and set out into the world, following the Radio's signal from the City of Light.
During their travels from the cabin to the big city, the appliances have many harrowing adventures where they slowly learn to work together: they come across a colorful meadow where a flower mistakes its reflection in Toaster's chrome plating as another of its kind, then wilts when the Toaster rejects its advances. When they need a place to stop for the night Blanky turns himself into tent for the group. Toaster has a nightmare in which he is attacked by an evil clown dressed as a firefighter. A violent storm in the middle of the night blows Blanky up into the trees, and Lampy risks his life by using himself as a lightning rod to recharge the group's dead battery. After recovering Blanky, the group tries to cross a waterfall, only to have everyone fall in except for Kirby. He bravely dives in after them and they wash up downstream, but now hopelessly lost.
Having lost the office chair and battery, the group resorts to pulling the disabled vacuum cleaner through the swamp. After almost drowning in quicksand, they are rescued by Elmo St. Peters, the owner of an appliance parts store. At the store they meet a group of partially dismantled or broken appliances, who have given up on hope in favor of B-Movie style horror and insanity. Facing the prospect of being dismantled and sold, the appliances trick St. Peters, allowing them all to escape and head into the city.
The appliances arrive at the Master's apartment only to discover that they have been replaced by modern Cutting Edge appliances. The group is tossed into the garbage in the hope that the Master will take the newer appliances to college instead. When the Master, who we find out is named Rob, arrives home after failing to find the appliances at the cabin, his black and white television broadcasts advertisements for the garbage dump where the appliances have been taken. Rob decides to go there and buy replacements.
At the dump the appliances watch as several cars, resigned to being Worthless, are picked up by a giant magnetic crane and dropped onto a conveyor belt advancing toward the car crusher, which smashes the cars to death. They attempt to foil the magnetic crane in order to allow Rob to find them. After being thwarted several times, the furious crane picks up Rob himself as well as all of the appliances save Toaster, and drops them on the compactor's conveyor belt. In a climactic act of self-sacrifice, Toaster leaps into the compactor's gears and stops the machine from destroying his friends and Rob. Rob returns to the apartment with all of the appliances in tow, including the now mangled Toaster. Despite his girlfriend Chris' skepticism, he repairs Toaster and takes all of them to college with him.

After watching this movie is when it happened - when the hoarding began. Movies that give human personification to inanimate objects made me think that all of my belongings had souls, therefore I could not part with anything. I feared that throwing something away would be detrimental to this little things self-esteem. This is how it has been since the age of 5 or 6. I also kind of think hoarding is genetic - judging from my Grandmother's house and my parent's house. Then my brother and sister are mini-hoarders as well. Luckily my brother, sister, and I each married non-hoarders.

John "helped" me last night in throwing away things like erasers, giant pencils, ticket stubs that I cannot even remember what they were for, etc. We made three piles - donate, trash, and keep. There were only a couple of items left for the "keep" pile to which my adoring husband said, "yeah, keep it so you can hold onto it for another 10 years and then throw away". Supportive, right? I ended up throwing out/donating about 2-3 bins of things. We also went through and reorganized all of the boxes we already have full of holiday specific decorations and my plethora of gift bags/tissue paper/bows. Slowly but surely I am throwing away the junk that we have no reason to hold onto. I wonder why it is so hard to throw away these things - its just stuff. Stuff I will never have a use for again that will remain hidden in these boxes following me everywhere. I have a goal of June 1st to be finished with all of my cluttering habits; so far we have made great progress!