With just under 10 weeks to go, now is the time to create yourself a simple Christmas plan so you can spread the workload for Christmas celebrations across many weeks. Doing a small amount each week is something that your future self will truly thank you for! It will help reduce the stress that comes when it hits the second week of December and you don’t have your head around what is happening for Christmas.
In Australia, not only is December the start of the festive season but it is also the end of the last school term for the year. So that means many end-of-year events, many end-of-season events on top of all the fun Christmas events. Investing some time in planning now means that you can enjoy this time much more, feel less stressed and be more present with your family.
And by creating a simple Christmas plan you can then much more easily delegate tasks to others so you are not left to do all the work yourself. The below table is the simple plan I have created for our family this year.
| Weeks To Go | Christmas Planning Activity | Status |
| 10 – Sun, 16 Oct | Create Christmas plan | Done! |
| 9 – Sun, 23 Oct | Update Christmas spreadsheets – budgets and gift ideas | |
| 8 – Sun, 30 Oct | Choose a Christmas theme | |
| 7 – Sun, 6 Nov | Set up a Christmas wrapping box | |
| 6 – Sun, 13 Nov | Create Christmas menu plan | |
| 5 – Sun, 20 Nov | Finalise Christmas present shopping | |
| 4 – Sun, 27 Nov | Set up the Christmas tree and start wrapping presents | |
| 3 – Sun, 4 Dec | Create a Christmas week work plan | |
| 2 – Sun, 11 Dec | Make food Christmas gifts | |
| 1 – Sun, 18 Dec | Undertake a final check and create a Christmas day plan | |
| 0 – Sun, 25 Dec | Celebrate! |
What to consider when creating your simple Christmas plan to reduce the stress
My plan above can work as a base for your plan but if you really want it to help reduce the stress you need to make sure you take into account your own situation. Here are some things to consider when creating your simple Christmas plan:
- Are you going away for Christmas or immediately after? If you are then you would want to have item/s regarding creating packing lists and packing in your plan.
- Do you have shared custody and need to factor in an earlier family Christmas celebration?
- Are you hosting Christmas? Do you need to allocate food items from the menu you have created to others?
- Do you have family or friends coming to stay in the lead-up? Then you might like to add item/s to the list to have the rooms etc set up for their arrival.
- If you are heading out for Christmas lunch then you would swap out the menu planning item and replace it with booking somewhere for lunch and you may want to move it up the order so you can get a spot at the place you love.
Delegating tasks from the simple Christmas Plan
As I noted in the intro, an awesome benefit of planning is that you can easily delegate some of the Christmas tasks to others in the household to ease some of the workload and therefore the stress. Once you have created your plan, look through the list and determine what you can delegate and to who. In our family, I do the bulk of the Christmas planning and I am pretty okay with that because I enjoy it but I do get the family to help with things like:
- My husband and I work together on setting the budget and he modifies the spreadsheet so I can easily track expenditures against the budget we have set.
- Wrapping presents – for the last three or so years, my daughter has beautifully wrapped all our presents! She likes doing this and does an amazing job at it so super happy to have her help with this.
- Everyone is involved with setting up and decorating the Christmas tree.
- When I create the Christmas week work plan I delegate a number of tasks to different family members – shopping, picking up items I have ordered, cleaning, decluttering and tidying up.
I have found showing the family the plan and asking if there are tasks they would like to do is a very helpful exercise. Even if you do not get many volunteers it actually highlights to the family the amount of work that needs to be done to make Christmas day the special day it is for the family.
Each week I will be sharing tips on my Christmas planning activity for the week and to help give you a nudge in the planning direction so you can spread out the workload! If you have any specific Christmas planning questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I will get back to you.
If you are super keen to get started on some Christmas planning activities you can check out my Christmas archives on the blog here.
Happy Christmas planning! Have you started it yet?
I am aware that Christmas is extremely stressful for some and planning like this is not going to solve the stress that they will have. These articles may help if you find Christmas an especially stressful time: