Tell me if this sounds familiar: “When I first had kids, it was hard to get rid of things. I wanted to hang on to every drawing, toy, and weed they’d picked for me,” Katie Bingham-Smith writes. And then? She got over it: “I only have so much room in my house, and I wanted to keep at least some of it as non-kid territory. Nowadays, I’m downright delighted by the prospect of the annual end-of-year purge. Hand me that trash bag, because I’m going in.”

What follows is an ode to that glorious pre-holiday tradition: THE PURGE. I dare you to read it without tackling your own closets.

Kelly Faircloth, Executive Editor

“‘You let your kids watch SpongeBob?!’ The woman standing across from me at daycare pickup was clearly shocked, but there was something else in her voice… judgment. Good ol’ garden-variety ‘my parenting is better than your parenting’ judgment,” remembers Julie Sprankles. Apparently, without knowing it, she’d stumbled into a hotly debated parenting topic. But today, years later, she’s embracing her status as a SpongeBob Mom. Let her tell you why!