kattitudes

There is a lot to do for Christmas and it always seems like not enough time to do it. We are taking on too much and stretching ourselves too thin.The name of the game here is preparation. Plan ahead. Take steps to make life easier on yourself and you will find that the holiday stress reduces and you find more joy throughout the season.The end goal here is to find the time to sit down calmly, Christmas carols on in the background, fire if it’s cold enough (and you have a fireplace), and enjoy the lights twinkling on the Christmas tree in your relatively clean home. I didn’t say organized or perfect or spotless or quiet. I said relatively and calmly. Big difference in all those words. We all want calm and we need to appreciate that what works in your house might not work in my house and that is A-OK.

This is the season of peace for mankind and by golly, it is also the season of peace for you. Make peace with your home and what you have done. Make peace with the fact that this might just not be the year that you Martha Stewart your house. So be it.

Hell, I push and pimp and two-bit dealer market making your own gifts all year long, but you know what? If it doesn’t happen, who the hell cares? This is all about peace here ladies (and gentlemen). If you weren’t able to make every single stinking last present this year, meh. The world still spins. Want to hear a confession? More than one year goes by that I purchase all my gifts. It happens.

So enough with the game day pep talk. On with the organization.

Here are some basic things to do now to get ready for the holidays. Seriously, take some time over the next few nights (now, while we are winding down from Halloween and time is still loose) and put this all together. You will thank yourself repeatedly through December for doing this.

1. Organize your gift wrap accessories: find a carryall type bag or bin (something with straps) and put everything you need but the wrap itself (too unwieldy) in there. I am talking scissors, tape, tags, bows, frills, tiny ornaments, fripperies, absolutely everything you need to wrap a present, with the exception of the big rolls of wrap themselves. That way when it is time to wrap, you can just grab that bag and run. I keep my stuff in a huge totebag with a zipper (bows included). When I am ready, I just pick out the roll of wrapping paper I want, sit myself down in front of the tv with the presents I’m going to work on, pop in a movie and do my thing.
   1. As part of that gift wrapping preparation, when you are sitting in front of the television, start making those cutesy little gift tag embellishments right now. We have all the little things we need. The tiny decorations somewhere. The stickers, the markers, the big tags. If you are going to make your own labels, start making them now so you aren’t in a panic later. You don’t have to fill in the TO: part yet, but you can make the cutesy gift tag embellishments while you are watching tv.
   2. Yes, long before the holidays hit, I will put up posts on how to make bows with blow by blow (oh did I want to make word puns there) illustrations. There are links all over the net and I have found some particularly fantastic ones, so I will include those too. If you aren’t up for that, I also have a mega huge list of ways to decorate packages without all the purchased doodads. I’ve talked before about the ongoing joke around the house with regards to the Mountain of Greed that gets left behind on Christmas morning. The huge pile of wrappings and bows and ribbons and such. It’s such a waste and the older I get, the more it bothers me. So this year, I’m going to start adding alternatives to wrapping so as to reduce the Mountain of Greed.
2. Get out all your decorations and put them all in one place as soon as you feel ready. You don’t have to put them up, but get them out and together. I put mine in the garage. We don’t use the whole garage, so it allows me to have a staging area. I get them out so I can go over what I have and what I feel like I need. That way I am ready to decorate. I can do this because I have decluttered to the point where I don’t have eleventy hundred boxes anymore. Just eleventy dozen. I also do this so that I can start accessing the boxes for the little pieces I need to make the handmade stuff. I don’t keep the little bits and bobs out all year long - I store it in with Christmas so I know where it is. So getting out the Christmas decorations right after Halloween means time to buckle down and get stuff made.
3. Now. Get your card list done now. I know. It’s one of those annoying things that is a pain sometimes because it means you have to go digging for addresses and such, but if you do it now, you don’t have to spend the beginning of December panicking that you don’t have an address. So just do it, ok? This step literally takes the longest time for me. Every year I make this list and put it away carefully so next year I won’t have to go through the crisis again. Every. Freaking. Year. I. Go. Through. The. Crisis. Again.
   1. Part of getting your cards done now is deciding if you are going to make them (I love this option for the creative side) or have them made (I love this option because it is less stress on me) or if you are going to buy them (I love this option because it is no fuss no muss and frankly the option I usually use because I have a stockpile of eleventy billion cards I have been trying to work through each year and I think I’m almost done finally).
   2. If you are going to use a photo in your cards, time to find one. This always takes time, so hurry.
   3. Figure out if you are going to write that Christmas newsletter. I always do a little movie, so it’s time for me to start gathering my photos and music and begin the process.
   4. If you have a mailing list and envelopes, start addressing those cards. Me, I broke etiquette long ago. I use address labels. I just do. May Emily Post come to my house and strike me down. It takes me five minutes to run my computer program and print out a gorgeous label set with clip art and print them out and five hundred hours to hand address each card. Guess which I do. And no one has fainted dead away from the Christmas card faux pas yet.
4. And on that note, make your gift list now. Right freaking now. You should know exactly who you need to be giving a gift to and have an idea of how much you want to spend on each person. It’s the beginning of November which means that if you don’t have a basic idea of how much you can spend at Christmas, you only have two months to work that out. We do not want to end Christmas with massive bills. Oh, no we do not.
   1. when you purchase and/or make your gifts, put them all in the same place. Oh trust me on this one. You do not want to lose them in your house, then spend Christmas Eve trying to figure out where you put them. Or Christmas morning. After presents have been opened. And there you are, wandering around, opening drawers and handing your sister one more present. And then finding just one more and handing that one to her. I’m just saying.
   2. Oh, and when you wrap ahead of time, for goodness sake, put a gift tag on the danged present. To be a smartass, one year I didn’t label wrapped presents to keep curious eyes from figuring out what present might be what. All that happened was that I forgot what present was what and I had to unwrap them all, identify them, then rewrap the damned things. Not one of my more brilliant Christmas maneuvers. Sheesh.
5. If you are making kitchen gifts, now now now. This is one area that you can get almost everything done this month!
   1. Preserves can be made now and put up in the cupboard to wait.
   2. All those amazing mix in a jars? Lasts easily through until December 25th. And if you purchase your supplies now, you don’t have to deal with the crisis grocery shopping (and pricing) near Christmas.
   3. And I know it sounds a little eeww, but it is true; cookie dough lasts up to three months in the freezer (and we are looking way under that at best). Ask Martha. So it is perfectly safe for you to make your Christmas cookie dough now, freeze it, then thaw it closer to the holidays and prep your gift baskets. Talk about a time saver. This has saved my anxious little tush on more than one occasion!
6. If you are planning parties, set your dates now. My Mister comes from a broken home and trying to balance all the families and their families and those families families? Oi. This is why we have our annual Bash on Boxing Day. The time crunch is over and besides, I like the alliteration. The sooner you can let friends know about potential parties, the easier it is on their schedules, and trust me, they do appreciate it. Sure, you always have that one person that has to say the obligatory “Oh, I can’t even think that far in advance of the holidays”, but you do not have to be that person. You can be the organized one.

I have a lot of websites that I want to share over the next few days. They are all craft type websites, but geared towards helping you with particular skills. Mostly needlework type as those need a little bit of explanation. I’ve searched around and found some real corkers. So if you are wanting some help getting some of the gifts done, these should really top off the need.

I’ve also found so many free patterns for gifts that you can make, it’s just not funny. Some I can post (well, I’m going to post anyway) but I’ll also include a link back so you can go to the source.

And in all the time that I cruise around, I have found some utterly fabulous supply shops, so I’m going to add a page listing where I find a heck of a lot of the stuff I buy (and it’s not just eBay). So if you are looking for a particular item (particularly for kitchen stuff - that can be a challenge sometimes for the mix in a jars bit) I found some great places that will ship you massive bulk.

So no worries. Lots of handmade gifts will be starting back up, but before then, I have huge amounts of links I want to share so that you can get your crafty on.

And people, don’t be afraid to talk to me. If you are looking for something, let me know. I’d love to chat about what you are doing and what you can and can’t find. I’m still rumbling around in my mind trying to figure out what to make for everyone this year, so I think I need to start talking about that in a few posts to try to get some ideas too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under christmas, kat chat, organization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.