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Home › Articles › Holiday: Winter › Ready or Not, Here They Come

Ready or Not, Here They Come

Preparing Yourself and Your Home for the Holidays

By Beth Skarupa

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It's the night before Christmas – your kids are snuggled up in their beds dreaming of candy canes and where are you? Staying up all night frantically wrapping presents, baking cookies, cleaning your house and trying to create the picture-perfect holiday you should have given up on weeks ago? If you're longing for a less stressful season, take time now to prepare yourself and your home for the holidays so you can actually enjoy them this year.

Get Past Perfectionism
Why do so many of us get overwhelmed by the holidays? According to Marla Cilley, a.k.a. cleaning and organizing expert Flylady, it's because we're trying to have the perfect holiday, and our perfectionism gets in the way. "We think we don't have the time to decorate the perfect Christmas tree so we put it off and don't do it," she says. "We're too busy trying to make the perfect finished product that we forget to enjoy the process. That's why we get too frazzled."

When we let our perfectionism get the better of us, we put things off until the last minute. "We don't think we have enough time to plan a little," says Flylady, who is also the author of Sink Reflections (Bantam, 2002). She advises completing most of your holiday preparations by Dec. 1. "Then you can enjoy baking cookies and doing Advent calendars or whatever you like to do for the holidays," she says. "You can have fun being with your family instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off."

One of Flylady's keys to getting past perfectionism is realizing "you can do anything for 15 minutes." Instead of telling yourself you don't have time, set a timer for 15 minutes and get something done. Wash the dishes in your sink, clear off a counter or de-clutter a room. If you keep making use of your time this way, you'll see progress. You can prepare for the holidays in the same way by decorating a little at a time, writing a few Christmas cards a day and planning your gifts, menus and activities.

"I used to find holidays stressful and then I made a decision just to enjoy," says Tracy Lyn Moland, mother of two and author of Mom Management: Managing Mom Before Everybody Else

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