Updated Sep. 22, 2019. Originally published May 7, 2013.

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Plan Once, Celebrate Yearly

The idea behind the holiday portion of our organization is the same as creating routines: much of our planning is usually the same, so it’s silly to do it over and over again.  It makes more sense to save the plans – or as much of them as possible – so we can use them over and over.

You can go as “big” here or as little as you want.  If you celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving, this is probably a big time of year for you that requires a bit of planning, so you probably want to include it.  Most of us probably don’t need to include a lot of the smaller holidays throughout the year (like St. Patrick’s Day), because our plans for those days are less significant.  This will vary considerably, of course, depending on how your family celebrates.  Generally speaking, the more your family does for any given holiday, the more likely you are to benefit from keeping “records” of your celebratory plans.

Christmas

I’m going to start with Christmas as an example, simply because it’s probably the best-known “big” holiday for celebration.  If you don’t celebrate Christmas, please follow along with me, anyway, because I’m illustrating concepts you can apply to whatever holidays you choose to celebrate in your home.  Even how we celebrate a single holiday will vary from family to family, so how you organize these plans will vary, as well.  Try to get an idea of how these principles can apply to whatever celebrations take place at your house!

What you will want to organize is anything that is recurring in your celebrations.  As an example, for us, Christmas tends to include cards sent primarily to the same people, gifts to be made or purchased (for many of the same people from year to year!), favorite recipes used annually, etc.  So the Christmas section of my household notebook includes this information.

Cards

I have a card list in this section.  It lists all of the people we send cards to every year.  (There may be people we sent to in any individual year in addition to this list, but there is a core list we use, and I don’t like to have to brainstorm it again every time, because I will inevitably miss someone!)  I include mailing addresses, and then when it’s time to send out cards I can simply go down the list and copy everything over to the envelopes.

Gifts

I don’t keep a gift list here, generally, although I could.  I tend to keep a “working” list with me in my planner (and at the end of the year I can copy it over for the new year), so I don’t need a duplicate list in the Christmas section.  But I do have a couple blank forms I keep in here for things like gifts to make, supplies needed, etc.

Recipes

Our favorite Christmas recipes are used here. In addition, we like to take plates of cookies to the neighbors.  This means I need to multiply the recipes, so I’ve made sure I wrote out the amounts for making multiple batches of each one.  I also have an overall shopping list for “cookie plate” recipe ingredients.  (This is currently being reworked because it’s a bummer to make a bunch of cookies I can’t eat!  So I’m working on converting to some GF options.)

Special Readings

We have certain Advent-type traditions that center around particular verses of Scripture, utilize themed songs, etc.  Putting these all in one place keeps us from having to look them back up every year.

Other Applications

Hopefully you’re getting the idea, even if your celebrations don’t look like ours!

We don’t tend to do much by way of Christmas party hosting or hosting out-of-town guests overnight, but if you do, you could include party-planning forms and/or checklists for having the house ready for houseguests.  For Thanksgiving you could include regularly-used recipes (and/or a turkey-timing chart, for those of us who can never remember how many minutes/pound it’s supposed to be!), and a timetable for getting things into the oven/onto the stove.

Other holidays have similar potential.  We have been working toward keeping the biblical feasts.  Because we’re just learning, we don’t really have set “plans” for many of them yet, but as we develop our traditions, find our favorite recipes, etc., I can add these things to the “list.”

How/Where Do You Store These Plans?

So what exactly do you do with these plans?  Well, chances are you don’t need access to this particular information on an everyday basis, so you probably don’t need it in your planner!  The household notebook is a good option – or you could have a separate,  “holiday plans” binder if you’d like a little more portability.  I actually combined both concepts and made myself a “satellite” book to go in my household book.

I typed up all of our Thanksgiving/Christmas information and had it printed at Lulu as a “saddle-stitched” book (magazine-style, essentially).  When it arrived, I had it 3-hole punched/drilled at Staples.  (If you have a thin book and/or really good 3-hole punch you can probably do this yourself.  If your book is fairly thick, a standard 3-hole punch won’t go through it.)  At Christmastime, I can pull it out and have a smaller book to work with.  But the rest of the year it stays inside my household notebook so I don’t lose it because it’s not another separate book.

Ultimately, I will probably have a Christmas booklet and a “Jewish holidays” booklet.  You could do something similar if you have a major celebration at one time of year, and other “medium-ish” holidays spread throughout the year.

STEP 1: Decide on the best way/place to store your holiday plans.

STEP 2: Brainstorm which traditions/information you use over and over for the various holidays.  (Store this list with your holiday plans until the full information has replaced it.)

STEP 3: Gather this information together into the designated location.

You can do this ahead of time, but you don’t have to.  If you prefer, you can just make a point, the next time that holiday rolls around, of saving the information you’re pulling out to use, as you use it.  The list you made will serve as your reminder of what you ultimately want to end up with, until you’ve gotten the holiday section “filled up” and can toss the list.

Your Input

I am interested in the way you set up any of your organization, because I like to see examples of how other people do things.  (Being visual, it helps me to have concrete ideas, even if I have to adapt them to make them work for me.)  But I am especially interested in what holidays you celebrate and what information it’s useful for you have “duplicated” from year to year, so please leave me a comment and let me know, and/or link to your blog post!

If you’re just stumbling across this, please click here for the other posts in the series.