How To Get Your Home Ready for Christmas

My home is NOT Christmas-ready. My goal is to have it done soon.

I want to keep Jesus first through the hustle and bustle of shopping, decorating, and baking season.

My goal is to get as much done in the first week of December as possible

I want to relax the last week before Christmas instead of frantically running around.

I’m sure that is what you would like too. If you are like me, you are running behind where the planning experts would say you should be as we enter the first week of December.

So, stick with me as I share some tips and honestly share where I am ‘at’ as we start December and have only 25 days until Christmas!!

Sit Down and Make a Plan

The first thing to do is to sit down and make a plan.

You are invited to sit down with a cup of hot chocolate and start making a plan to keep stress and overwhelm to a minimum this Christmas.

I’ll join you since I have some planning to do too!!

I don’t care if it is on a scratchpad, your planner, or somewhere on your computer. Just make a plan!!

• Christmas brain dump. First, do a brain dump for about 15-60 minutes. Get all those stressed, overwhelmed thoughts out of your head of what you want to do, have to do, parties, and events that must occur before Christmas.
• Think about those ideas that you spilled out in your brain dump. Choose the ones that you think you can accomplish. Scratch off the rest. Yes, scratch them off.
• Get out your phone, calendar, or planner and enter the events including any important details. I enter the date, time, address, and who is going into my phone and update it when necessary. If you have children, color-coding the events is helpful. That will work in your planner or wall calendar. Some calendar apps will let you color-code your family members.
• Next take tasks like shopping, baking, and gift wrapping, and schedule them into your day. Seeing it visually ensures that you leave blocks of time for each activity you need to accomplish.

Making Your Home Ready for Christmas

I want to be helpful and give you solutions to make December less stressful.

Stress over the holidays comes from having too much to do in too little time.

There is nothing like having a time crunch.

I am never prepared for Christmas shopping until Thanksgiving has passed!

The cooking involved in Thanksgiving is huge for me and I can’t think clearly until the dishes are done.

Once December is here, I am feeling the excitement of the crunch.

How about you? Maybe you are more prepared than me?

1. Start by cleaning your home. I don’t mean deep cleaning, that is for fall or in spring. Just vacuum, wash floors, and if you have time, dust (I didn’t dust :P). Picking up the clutter is a good thing to do all year round but if your house needs decluttering December isn’t the month to do it! GASP!! Just swoop it all into a closet (and don’t tell anyone I said that!). We’ll get to decluttering in January.
2. Decorate – Get those bags and boxes of decorations from the attic or closet where you store them. I don’t have an overabundance of decorations and that’s so helpful in keeping the stress away. Take a visual inventory of what you have and whether you’ll need Christmas lights. It’s disappointing to get the tree up, and then make an emergency run to the store for lights. Ask me how I know!! I prefer to decorate and then put the tree up.
3. Put up your Christmas tree – Do you do a fake or fresh tree? I do fresh (after growing up with ‘fake’ and having a fake for many married years) I love it.
4. Gift shopping – First, list the people you’ll need to shop for. I like to get a few extra inexpensive gifts just in case. We had several hand-crafted Christmases when we were completely broke when I first quit my job and our combined salary was cut in half. If you are making your gifts, you will need extra time. Whatever you are doing . . . GET STARTED so you don’t stress and will be Christmas-Ready!!
5. Shopping for baking supplies – I have a binder for all the recipes I make for the holidays. It includes all the cookies I love to make (not that I don’t add a few new ones). Make a list of ingredients and keep it in your binder (you DO have a Holiday Binder, don’t you?!) so when you are ready for Christmas baking, all you have to do is grab your list and run out the door to the store. No stress!!
6. Gift wrapping – Start early. Wrap up soon after each shopping trip if you can. Keeping up with wrapping will give you a good night’s sleep on Christmas Eve. Again, I know you are wondering how I know!! I have never gotten this tip down. Don’t worry, I dole out advice I don’t take myself.
7. Mailing gifts – Do you have to mail gifts? Don’t wait too late! Don’t wait until you have to overnight the packages to get them to your loved ones by Christmas. I have to mail gifts to some of my children and it’s a major incentive to get started early.

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Now that your hot chocolate is sipped clear to the bottom of the mug, are you ready to start getting ready for Christmas? By the end of the first week in December, I hope to put a HUGE dent in my preparations for getting my home ready for Christmas.

There are those uber-organized women who have their shopping done by the end of September but they miss all the excitement, wouldn’t you think?!

How about YOU? Will you be ready for Christmas? Do you typically get a little stressed and overwhelmed?

CHRISTMAS ROUND-UP: Read more Christmas posts HERE!!