Christmas Planning
Year after year, we swear we're going to get an earlier start, we're going to plan ahead and yet each year, Christmas is the same frantic holiday complete with a breakneck pace of buying, wrapping, cooking, and parties all guaranteed to overextend our time and nerves.
Make it different this year...
Yes. Christmas is one of the most stressful times of the year. The Christmas holiday encompasses so many different aspects - from choosing the gifts (and getting them wrapped) to all of the delicious meals, and the work related events, no wonder it can get stressful! Add church gatherings and special services and it's enough to make even the jolliest person wish Christmas would hurry up and just pass.
The best way to overcome any frustration and disappointment is to plan ahead.
You need a plan that will deal with each element individually so that they work together as a whole to give you a great holiday season day after day...
Planning Your Christmas Decorations - Spread out Your Work Over Time
Tradition, for most people, involves putting up the Christmas tree and all of the indoor and outdoor decorations either right after or within a week of Thanksgiving - but there's a better way for those who feel overwhelmed. The best way to decorate inside or outside your home for the holidays is to do it a piece at a time, a room at a time, a yard display at a time.
Don't start in your kitchen, dining or living room. Those are considered to be the rooms where the majority of decorating takes place. Begin in another room instead. If you change bed linens and quilts to match your holidays, do it by the thirty day rule.
Thirty days before the actual holiday, change all linens, quilts and decorative pillows. That way, you get to enjoy the holiday flair. It's often the expectation of the holiday that gives us the greatest sense of excitement as well as the actual day.
Visit Amazon.com's Christmas Corner for all your Christmas decorating needs - Christmas trees, Ornaments, Christmas lights, Christmas stockings, wreaths & garlands, Christmas villages, Nativity sets, Christmas figurines and more.
Christmas Corner
Change the little decorations, the flowers, the floor rugs, etc. Replace any everyday candles with holiday colored and holiday scented ones. Within a day or two, decorate the bathrooms.
Hang holiday towels and rugs, change over any nightlights and hang holiday themed shower curtains. Remove and store any regular counter and wall decorations and replace them with your holiday ones. Replace bath rugs with holiday ones.
Once the bathrooms are done, take a break and then start on the kitchen. In the kitchen, put out any holiday cookie containers, change over any oven mitts or towel sets and if you switch curtains, do that as well. Put out the holiday stove burner covers and wash any holiday place settings - including
tablecloths, runners and place mats.
The next day in the dining room, make room for your holiday decorations. Take off any everyday chair pads and backs and replace them with the ones you have in holiday reds or greens. Cover the table with the holiday runner or tablecloth.
Take a day off and then do the living room. Set up the tree, hang the decorations and wrap the base with the skirt or decorative cloth you use. Hang the stockings on the fireplace.
The next day, set out any ornamental villages. Put the decorative pillows on the sofa. Change over the ordinary lampshades for a red, green or gold one. Set the Christmas decorations on end tables. Some people display a bowl of pinecones or a bit of greenery such as silk holly leaves and berries. Never use real berries where small children can reach them.
When you're ready to get started on the outside, do the roof lights and decorations first. That's usually the biggest job and this way, you'll get it out of the way first. The next day, string any bushes or trees with your choice of Christmas lights. If you use more than one yard display, work on one or two displays a day until you get them all set up.
Lastly, hang a wreath on or by the door and you're all done! Since it's not Christmas yet, this should leave you plenty of time to relax and just enjoy the season and the decorations you've created to instill a sense of seasonal warmth to your home.
Get more Christmas decorating ideas from the following pages:
Indoor Christmas Decoration
Inflatable Christmas Decorations
Outdoor Christmas Decorating Ideas
Heirloom Christmas Decorations
Christmas Lights
Christmas Tree
Christmas Nativity Scenes
Plan Your Christmas Menus Early - Don't Wait Until the Last Minute
Nothing can frazzle us more than trying to rush around cooking against the clock. That frazzle factor goes up tremendously if we forget something because we didn't plan until the last minute. There's a way to avoid the frazzle factor.
Figure out ahead of time when all of the parties, church gatherings, special meals and work related celebrations are going to be held. Take a large calendar - the desktop ones work well for this - and in the large blocks, write down the events by their due dates and the foods you'll need for each event.
Then once you have everything written down, you'll know at a glance where you need to be, when and what items you're bringing. Purchase all needed food items at the beginning of the month so that you can have them on hand. The best time to buy ham or turkey for Christmas meals is at the same time you pick up your Thanksgiving meat.
Unfortunately, some hosts only give a two week notice that an event is going to take place, but you can still work within that time line. Two weeks before the event, purchase all of the foods you'll need.
Pick out what outfit you'll wear (right down to the accessories), make sure the outfit has either been picked up from the dry cleaner or you drop it off as soon as you know about the party.
If you have to bring a home baked item, bake it now and freeze it. In airtight freezer containers, foods can keep safely (and taste delicious) for months prior to use. The trick with baking goods is that you can take one day out of a weekend and bake enough goods to last the entire Christmas season.
You can bake a batch of cookies or candies all at once for every party. You can use store bought items to save the time it takes to bake, but if you do this, make sure you remove them from their original packaging and freeze them so they'll keep, too. The night before the event, simply thaw out the amount of treats you'll need, slip them into a large, decorative Christmas bag and you're on your way.
Most foods for any party - whether work or personal or church related - can be prepared well ahead of time and frozen until needed. Stress comes our way when we put off preparing the dish or treat and then scramble the night before the event (or worse the day of) to get everything ready.
For church events, don't forget if you're bringing food that has to be kept refrigerated to make sure access to the kitchen will be available and that there will be room for your dish - otherwise you might need to plan a different recipe.
When preparing food for any event, including your own Christmas Eve or Christmas Day meal, you'll want to start first with a guest list so that you can determine the amount of food you'll need.
Decide who will be joining you and whether they're adults or children because you can figure in less food consumption for children. Categorize your holiday meal according to the course - the main meats and side items and of course, the desserts.
The best rule of thumb to remember when buying meat for guests is to figure a half a pound of meat for each adult and a quarter of a pound for each child. Make as many side dishes as you can one to two days in advance of the Christmas Eve meal.
The reason most people get overloaded with cooking for the holidays is because they try to make the entire meal either the night before or the same day and then they're too worn out to enjoy the company or the festivities. So plan ahead and don't be shy about asking for help in the kitchen from family members!
More information in the following pages:
Christmas Dinner Menus
Christmas Party Ideas
Plan To Have Your Christmas Shopping Done Early
Every year, it seems the circle of people we know and buy gifts for increases. But you don't have to rush around in the crowds and spend hours choosing individual gifts for each person on your list.
Buy the same item for multiple people, especially if they're not in the same social circle. You can give the same gift to your elementary child's teacher as you do your high school teen's teacher.
You can buy the same gifts for people in your place of employment as you do your spouse's. Some great gifts to buy in larger quantities include gourmet food boxes. The ones containing cheeses, meats and crackers make excellent thinking of your Christmas gifts as do the food boxes with coffees and jellies.
You can buy decorative tins (no wrapping needed) and fill them with an assortment of hard candies. Just make sure you don't put peppermint in the mix because it flavors other candies.
You can also purchase new Christmas ornaments commemorating the year as gifts. Bookstore certificates are always a hit since most people love to read and you can order these right from home without getting out into the crowds.
If you know what your friends or acquaintances do as a hobby or a group of special items they like to collect, you can pick those up well before the holidays. If you choose to go with a personal touch and shop and send out gifts, don't waste your valuable time standing in line for half an hour to an hour at the post office.
Never go during a lunch break or right before closing. This increases your wait time. Go early in the morning or a couple of hours after lunch break. Better yet, don't go to the post office at all. Have it come to you instead.
Right from the comfort of your own home, you can buy shipping material (you can even get some supplies free), print out the postage and arrange a pickup from your home and the pickup is done at no charge to you. If you shop online and ship online, not only do you save time and beat the shipping crowd stress, but
you gain time you can use in other ways to celebrate Christmas.
The number one tip to remember when it comes to gift buying is not to wait until you have to get it done. Begin right now. Shopping early not only takes the stress off by giving you more time, but it helps financially because you're not forking over large sums of money (or putting it on your credit card) all at once and paying for last minute expensive shipping.
Make a list of everyone you feel you should buy a gift for. Beside each name, jot down an idea of something you know they like or might like. Starting today, begin to pick some of those items up.
Some family members are notoriously hard to buy for and instead of dealing with the question of what to get them, ask them to give you a suggestions list. Numbering from one to ten, have them write down what they'd like for Christmas in order of importance to them. This idea works well with teenagers.
Have a shopping deadline in mind. One way to beat the stress is to have a goal to be finished with all of the prep work for Christmas meals and shopping by Thanksgiving. It can be done if you start now.
More information:
Online Christmas Shopping
Christmas Gift Ideas
Online Gift Cards
One other very important shopping task you must do is:
Stock Up on Christmas Candles Before the Holidays!
How frustrating is it to plan the perfect holiday and get ready to purchase a sought after item like Christmas candles and you can't find the scent you want because all of the good ones are gone?
If you wait, you'll get stuck with the leftovers - the ones that have been picked over and no one else wanted. Tradition has it that the biggest shopping day of the year is the day after Thanksgiving.
On that day, consumers all across America crowd into stores determined to bring home what they need at a bargain price. Or they jam Internet websites ordering items left and right and some sites have even crashed due to the enormous volume of visitors.
Why do people put off buying what they need until the last minute? Until they have join the herd of people trying to shop? It's certainly not fun. Part of the reason why we put off shopping (besides those of us who are procrastinators at heart) is because we fall into line and we follow tradition. What's so great about a tradition that raises your blood pressure and creates mass clouds of rudeness? Nothing.
Don't wait until the holidays are right in front of you to stock up on your Christmas candles. Don't put yourself in the stressful position where you must get the candles. Get them early so you can relax.
Make Early Plan of Your Christmas Holiday Party
Planning a party is always a big endeavor, but toss in the flurry of extra activities at the holidays and it can take a toll on even the most organized people. You should always do some holiday party planning so that the event runs as smoothly as possible with the least amount of fuss on your part.
You want to start out by setting the date for your party as early as you can. There are a lot of parties given in December and you don't want to get a lot of, "Sorry, can't make it" replies because someone else's party was scheduled first.
Remember that more is not always merrier. You don't want to invite so many people that everyone is packed in elbow to elbow. Send out invitations to those you really want to spend time with. You can send out invitations via snail mail or through email and there are even some free email invitations you can use for your party.
Walk out of your house and back in. Does it have a Christmas scent? If not, you can prepare the scents in your home before the party by using cinnamon scented pinecones or you can simmer orange peels and cinnamon in a pot on the stove. You can also sprinkle scented oil such as warm cookies in your vacuum cleaner bag. Run it over the carpet or floor and it'll give off a nice scent.
Is your party going to be formal or casual? Will your party be for women only? Men only? Will it be a family party? You can base your theme around the tone of your party. If you're going to have a theme party, stick with one or two colors max. There are many different themes to choose from.
Winter Wonderland: You can have a winter wonderland party by having only silver colors. From the decorations inside to the sprayed silver silk poinsettias lining the walk outside, you can make your home sparkle like a winter day. Hang hundreds of tiny white Christmas lights throughout your entertaining area. You can use white dishes to set your table with and white candy canes for seating markers.
Recipe Exchange Party: This theme party takes some of the pressure off the person hosting the party because the snacks are brought by the guests. Send out invitations and every person attending has to bring a favorite cookie recipe along with a plate of those cookies.
Kids Make It and Take It: If you have children as most of your friends do and desire to have a party where the kids can feel like a part of it, have a simple project ready for the kids to make that can be completed during the party.
Black Tie Christmas Party: You can host an elegant get together with your friends and family and give the grown ups a night out. Break out the best china. Remember that white is always elegant, so incorporate that when you're decorating. Serve champagne and have room for slow dancing. It'll be a night your loved ones won't forget.
There are so many Christmas ideas for holiday party planning that you might get overwhelmed just trying to decide which one you want to choose. But just remember that you can always try out another idea the following year!
More Christmas Party information in this page:
Christmas Party Ideas
Remember the Meaning of Christmas and Enjoy Your Planning Efforts
It's so easy to want that gorgeous, spectacular Christmas because we chase perfection. It's human to want to put your best foot forward but believe it or not, it's not always rewarding and it doesn't always give you a sense of fulfillment.
Sometimes, we can get so caught up in all the Christmas planning and all of the activities that we forget the entire meaning of Christmas. The season is not about getting the perfect gift or wrapping it to look like a work of art. It's not about having a meal so delicious it'll go down in family history.
Christmas is a time for each of us to understand the special days we have with the people who mean the most to us. It's a celebration of Christ and what this life is all about. During the holidays, we get a chance to make the most of those special days.
Everyone is so busy working during the year, and this is a time we can step back and reconnect with friends and loved ones. We get to relax and laugh and reminisce. We get to celebrate life together and hand down traditions from one generation to the next.
It's important for children to see the dynamics of a family unit - the way we laugh together, love together, the way we cherish those special holidays. Remember that your children won't be as impressed with the beautiful wreath as they will if you take time to sit down and play a holiday game with them.
The meaning of Christmas is the way we give to one another, the way we take the time to appreciate all that we have in life and focus on the good in one another. Christmas is about reaching out to our circle and beyond.
It's about slowing down, taking a deep breath and holding fast to each and every special moment that comes our way. It's about letting the good within us spill over into the lives of others.
Celebrate this Christmas season by slowing down and taking time to enjoy it. Planning your Christmas ahead is going to ease you into the holidays so that they're stress-free and more enjoyable than ever before!
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