Christmas is six weeks away. Five weeks and four days if you want to be anal about it. Being naturally disorganized, my inclination is to not think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. If you’re like I, then you still have your Halloween bin in the hallway. But, after I had children, I realized that the denial approach was not going to work out well for me.
Let me preface this diatribe with the fact that my husband and I have never been on the same page where Christmas was concerned. Despite dating for nine (yes, nine) years before we were married, and joining in each other’s’ family festivities, I somehow missed his laissez faire attitude towards Christmas prep. Put the tree up? Eh, whenever. Decorations? Eh, don’t need them. Shopping? I’ll just give money so they can get what they want. Ugh, we couldn’t be more different.
Over the years, my “style” of Christmas has won over, mainly because I do all the work. Oh, Chuck helps get the tree and put it in the stand, and he’ll do other things that I ask, but he still doesn’t think we need to do any of it. And, maybe, theoretically, we don’t. But I like it, and as long as the kids and I are still getting something out of it, I’ll keep on decorating, cooking, and giving gifts.
So, that brings me back to organization – or lack thereof. The holidays are one of those things that totally tilt your precarious management of home, kids, work, life. It’s a whole ‘nother plate to spin when the others were already wobbling. It took me a few years to finally get into a plan that works. I realized that the “make it up every year” strategy was not working and stressing me out. So, like a lot of other occasions in life – vacation, back to school, birthday parties, etc., there are a bunch of things that you do every year. That means that they can be scheduled in my calendar so that I don’t forget or miss them.
I’ll be sharing some of my tried and true holiday tricks over the next couple of weeks – I know, I know, it’s not even Thanksgiving, but believe me when I say I’m not proposing that you complete your shopping and wrap everything over the next two weeks – that is just not going to happen in my house ever. But, there are some tasks that demand a little bit of advance planning, and pay off big time, despite what Chuck might say J
