Savoring the Holiday Season

I can sense the holiday mania revving up, judging by the volume of retailer emails in my inbox.  Express clothing store is open at midnight on Thanksgiving??  Not for me, even with a 50% discount.  The best way I know of to enjoy the season is to make a plan for what needs to be done, what I can spend, and what I am buying at which stores.  Fewer trips saves money and sanity.

Enter… Flylady’s ‘Cruising Through the Holidays Control Journal’ – available free at flylady.net.  Here’s how I use mine.

Print your control journal for free

You can set aside 10-15 minutes a day to bring your holiday plans to life.  Don’t stress yourself out by trying to knock this out in one sitting!

Menu Planning

Are you hosting a gathering?  This is my menu plan in the works.  I also have notes for what categories of food others can bring.   Will you be needing any items such as disposable plates, paper napkins, or drinks & alcohol that you don’t normally buy?  Today I made a note to ask my husband what drinks he plans to serve, and what supplies will he need to do that.

Make a grocery list

Start fleshing out the grocery list on the next page.  Is there anything you rarely use, such as maraschino cherries or worcestershire sauce that may be expired and needs replacing?  My worcestershire sauce was older than my daughter.  Oops!

Gift List

A gift list is essential.  For me the gifts that send me out at the last minute are the non-family gifts:  mailman, teacher, garbage man.  Put on the tea kettle, put up your feet, and spend 5 minutes thinking of what gifts you need to have for family and non-family.  Will you be putting out a stocking or a shoe for St Nick on the night of December 5?  That is a week away . . .

The Cruising Through The Holidays packet also has useful pages for those who need to mail packages, or travel to a family gathering.  At the end of the year, save the pages you used for planning until next year.  You will have a record of what you spent on gifts, and what food items you served.  This will help you start to save money towards holiday expenses long before a Black Friday email has graced your inbox!

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

Here Comes Santa Claus . . .

I’ve been missing a bit this week from blog-land.  Would you believe I have been preparing for Christmas?  Our family Christmas celebration is in 2 months at our home.  The early parts of December are filled with fun family times and I want to be able to enjoy them and not be messing around looking for Scotch-tape and a gift for the mail carrier.  Last year I got so busy that I barely made any Christmas cookies, which is something I truly love to do.  I hope to do better this year.

The best resource I know for preparing for the holidays is Flylady’s Holiday Control Journal.  It is completely free and you can start it using whatever timeline you have until your winter celebration.   Each day you can take a small action towards preparing for your holiday, for example I checked my supplies and I need tape, ribbon, and possibly one roll of wrapping paper this year.  Another day I looked through our summer vacation pictures while enjoying a cup of coffee and marked some for possible use in a card.

Despite the continuing federal government shutdown, we had a budget surplus this week so I bought one gift card to stash for gift-giving.   I will do this periodically, budget permitting, and the rest of our gifts will come out of our budget category for Christmas gifts.

All this thinking about Christmas made me check my daughter’s winter coat.  It was a size 6x!  More appropriate for a 1st grader than a 3rd grader!  We ordered a new one this weekend (money in the budget set aside for winter kid clothing) and were able to partially pay for her new coat with some of the money in our Paypal account from my Ebay selling binge in August.

Now I ought to make sure we don’t forget to get a Halloween pumpkin with all this Christmas planning afoot!