Christmas in July! Er, August?

Organized Christmas Rudolph Club

Every Summer on July 25th, my year-round Christmas on-line group the Rudolph Club has an assignment to choose a holiday plan for the year. There are many to choose from these days. And since I so enjoy kicking back over my holiday break, sipping eggnog and playing games with my family, I like having all the planning and preparations finished and my house squeaky clean down to the inside of closets and cabinets well before the big week arrives. I have had a few bad years, especially my first years as a wife and mother, and I would not have even considered starting to get ready until the weeks just before Christmas arrived. That created several very stressed out, over-spent and ill-prepared years that made me crabby when I should have been enjoying my family and friends.

The holiday plan that I have been doing for nearly two decades, with slight diversions to try something new from time to time, is Katie Leckey's (and the Get O list serve group's) Holiday Grand Plan. It starts in late August and gives a system of deep cleaning the house from top to bottom, or end to end, room by room, from late summer until the late fall/early winter celebrations begin. You also get a system of holiday preparation tasks to make sure you are calm and sane when the weeks of celebration begin.

Cynthia Townley Ewer of Organized Home and Organized Christmas has had a Christmas Countdown plan around since 1998, that basically focuses on getting the holiday tasks completed over a six week stretch. I have done this a few years, usually when I was so disorganized that the Holiday Grand Plan had got started before I was ready to commit, and CEO's Christmas Countdown saved me (and my family).

Cynthia's newest version of Houseworks

This year I am ready for year two of the Housework's Holiday Plan, also created by Organized Home's CEO (Cynthia Ewer, Organized) that is part a Houseworks book club and part a tweaking of the Holiday Grand Plan that focuses more on areas of living rather than room by room cleaning. It went very well for me last year. This year I am teaching nearly until Christmas Eve, so I can't wait until Christmas Break arrives to get it all together. So I am starting this week, today in fact, with planning, dusting off my holiday planner and getting my home office area in ship shape as a beginning to a stress free autumn/holiday season.

For those that are not ready to start a holiday plan just yet, but want a plan that will help them Cruise Through the Holidays, FLYLady Marla Cilley's plan will begin in a month or so, and can help you to babystep your way through. I have many FLYFriends that have used this stress-free plan and had very nice results over the holidays.

So let the Houseworks Holiday Plan begin...and remember there are only 117 days left until Christmas. And as Cynthia likes to ask, "Will you be ready?"

It's Time to Break Open the Binder

My Christmas Binder came out of the closet during the final weeks of August. Inside it I have some of the best ideas from the web to get a person on track for the fall and Christmas/New Year holidays. I have the room-by-room plan and chore lists from the Holiday Grand Plan, the Christmas Countdown with its six-week checklists, reading recommendations, recipes and CEO's entertaining and helpful articles that I come back to year after year. It also contains two newer additions that I added two years ago, FLYLady’s Holiday Control Journal that has some wonderful meal and gift planning forms and CEO's Houseworks Holiday Plan that uses her book to help catapult the Christmas preparation plan.

Although I had brought the binder out two months ago, I have come to the conclusion this year that I do not want to hyper-focus on Christmas from August to October. In August and early September I like to squeeze every last drop of summer out of each day, so when working on the Holiday Housework Plan I am only focusing on the things that are only indirectly related to Christmas. This past week was the focus on the family areas areas. I still need to get my amaryllis bulbs started for here and one for my grandma. We have also decorated for Halloween and tonight the boys are carving jack-o-lanterns. When October hits, I do like to have the idea in my head that I will be prepared for Christmas, but I do not want to miss out on what autumn has to offer. I appreciate Christmas Countdown's emphasis on fall holidays and preparing the home so that when December arrives, the final touches of execution are all that are required.

So now I am going through the Christmas Planner web pages to see what needs an update before the first week begins tomorrow. I am going to use my binder for all of the lists and reading materials and the planner pages for the things that would be nice to be portable like shopping lists for gifts and holiday meals.

Holiday Chaos? Not This Year!

CEO's Christmas Countdown is ready to begin in just two days. Has it really been ten years? Yikes! I have been following the program for many years. I didn't jump in the first year or two she had it up on the message board, but I did join the mailing list as soon as she made it available. I was at first following Katie Leckey's Holiday Grand Plan from the Holiday Grand Plan List Serve group. Over the years I have enjoyed CEO's tasks, reminders, links to articles and of course the recipes. I still have printed copies of these in my Christmas Countdown Holiday Organizer. CEO, aka Cynthia Townley Ewer, the author of Houseworks and the editor of the website Organized Christmas, also developed a Houseworks Holiday Plan, that I have been successfully using for a couple of years. I have been enjoying the Holiday Tips on the Organized Christmas site this year since the beginning of September when this year's Houseworks Holiday Plan began.

Flylady has also helped me through my organizational challenges in years past with the Holiday Cruising Missions on her list and The Holiday Control Journal.

This year, with the experiences I have had with the different programs for over a decade, I am going to use the Houseworks Holiday Plan to keep the house in order and the Christmas Countdown site to keep my holiday preparations on track and finished before the last minute. I will still do any of the FLYLady missions that help simplify my life (her missions started Monday), but I am sticking to CEO's plan. Do you hear the commitment in my tone.

Why am I so adamant about this promise some two months before Christmas is even here? I know that I don't want to be wrapping gifts at 2 a.m. on Christmas morning. I have spent years with shopping only on the few days before Christmas and being frazzled and short tempered because I tried to do a lot in a little time. I have also enjoyed years with a plan with everything wrapped days before Christmas, shopping finished weeks before Christmas, evenings spent enjoying sitting in front of a fire with the family and even planning for guests coming to my house through each of the holiday meals and a party for my mother's side of the family one day and another party for my husband's many siblings and their families another day, and all went well. The difference between working the plan or not is CHAOS or relaxed sanity. I prefer the latter.