5 Ways to Simplify for Christmas

In about a month, the most anticipated day of the year will be here. Does hearing that fill you with calm or maybe a little bit of anxiety? I hope that this year you remember that the magic CAN happen no matter what stage of life you're in, but it can also happen without wearing you down in the process. In this blog, I'll go over 5 ways I've simplified my home to take the stress out of Christmas while still making it a magical time of year.

Simplify Your Home for Christmas

1. Let’s simplify decorating. 

Decorating should be fun and efficient. At such a busy time of year it should not be another thing on your list that feels overwhelming or daunting. If you approach decorating with an attitude of setting your future self up for success, I promise you will do just that. When pulling items out and when putting things away, be intentional about what you are keeping and where things are going. 

Here are my top tips for simplifying your holiday decor this year:

• Take pictures of your home BEFORE you decorate.

• Reference pictures of last year’s decor. If you don’t have them, make sure you take them this year.

• Edit and donate items you no longer love/use as you decorate.

• Put everyday decor away while Christmas decor is out to help avoid sensory overload.

• Set your future self up for success with a plan. As you are taking things out, identify what storage solutions would make your life easier next year and order them now so they will be ready for you when you take things down after Christmas. If you need help, schedule a consultation with us now to take care of organization next year or check out my blog post on getting organized before & after the holidays.

Having a Christmas tree and a decorated mantel feels amazing, but you may not want to do more than that. We all have different homes and different levels of decorating. Try to rid yourself of the pressure to "deck the halls" of every inch of your home. If the fun of decorating has turned into pressure, decide what level of decorating will keep the fun without any of the added burden.

2. Let’s simplify traditions.

I am the traditions queen. It's almost ridiculous how many traditions I've started and continued throughout the years with my kids. They're all fun and many are meaningful. Some don’t require a lot of work or investment, and some do. I made a huge step forward this year in acknowledging my limits, prioritizing my self care and letting go of some traditions that I had been pretty rigid with in years past. 

I will share one example to illustrate how it really is okay to let go and acknowledge that the tradition can sometimes drain us more than it fills our bucket. And sometimes we (as the mothers, primary caregivers, and primary tradition followers) care about the traditions more than anyone else.

I love Christmas cards. Even when I had a small holiday budget, I would save up and find a way to get family pictures. I would use any coupon I could find to get the cheapest Christmas cards printed and send them out. I have done it every single year… for 17 years. This year, life has just felt a little heavier. There's been a lot going on personally and in my business and to top that off I just wasn’t feeling up for family pictures. The expense felt out of our budget, and fall came and went (my favorite time to take family pictures if the opportunity didn’t present itself earlier in the year).

I found myself consumed with guilt and sadness over not making family pictures happen. I knew we didn’t have anything passable for a great family portrait and kept thinking of a way I could pull off a family photo shoot. Then last week, as I was printing some marketing materials for Reset Your Nest, I saw an ad for Christmas cards pop up. I decided to try to pull something together, and I did. Within 10 minutes I had a Christmas card designed. The front of the card is a picture of us skiing as a family (covered head to toe in ski gear so not the ideal Christmas card pic) and the back highlights each one of my kids doing something they love that is uniquely them. 

And guess what? My kids have said it's their favorite Christmas card we've ever made. It's not my first choice, but in minutes I was able to take something off my plate that could have taken hours and hours with outfit shopping selection, driving to a location, photo taking, photo selecting, etc. I still prioritized the tradition that meant the most to me, but changed it so it worked for my life, schedule, and stress levels this year.

The same thing happened a few years ago when I finally realized that the homemade cinnamon rolls I slaved over every Christmas Eve so we could eat fresh rolls on Christmas morning were just as good as some amazing frozen ones I found. No one in my family noticed or cared (they just wanted cinnamon rolls), and I got hours back on one of the busiest days of the year.

Moral of the story? Traditions are amazing, fun, and a part of what creates the magic of Christmas... but sometimes it’s ok to adjust traditions to fit each stage and season of your life. Don’t be so rigid in your traditions that you allow them to drain your energy and time when an adjustment could save both you and the magic.

3. Let’s simplify expectations.

So often, I'm the one who is creating unrealistic expectations for the season. I'm the one who wants the perfectly decorated mantel, the perfectly wrapped gifts, the delicious homemade caramels, and the best holiday party of the season. Stepping back and recognizing who the expectation belongs to and why that expectation exists has helped me to determine priorities and also reset.

One thing I have learned is that communicating with my family first and really understanding what they want out of the holiday season has allowed me to let go. I still have certain expectations and things I do that are really just for me (Christmas cards and my annual cookie exchange party being two of those things). Acknowledging what's important to me and prioritizing those things for the right reasons while accepting what's important to other family members and honoring that has made a major difference for me and my family. Some of the change has been sad as my kids express that maybe they don’t want to go to 'A Christmas Carol' that year or maybe they've grown out of the 'Polar Express train ride', but instead we are able to prioritize the things they actually care about.

One of the ways we set clear expectations for the season is by writing a family bucket list of all the fun things we want to do in December. We also write all of our plans on a calendar so we can be realistic about our hopes of what we can do that year. With recitals and activities, sometimes it's actually impossible to get it all in and we need to let certain things go. It allows us to set intentions for the season together and prioritize the most important things.

Gift giving is another area where I've found that it's important to set clear expectations. This is especially true as my kids get older and want either crazy expensive gifts or gifts that don't align with what we have deemed as age appropriate. (Why does every kid want a phone and airpods every year starting at age 6?) I try to talk to my kids about the types of gifts that would be fun and give them ideas that are more in our price range to temper expectations for what Christmas day might look like.

4. Let’s simplify gift giving.

Once you’ve set expectations around what gift giving will look like, here are a few more tips I have for keeping things together and organized so the process of getting those gifts under the tree feels easy.

• Designate a spot to hide all your gifts and label the bin(s) something extremely uninteresting. This will save time trying to track down gifts hidden throughout your house.

• Keep a list on the notes app on your phone. I use the checklist function and write down all of my ideas and then check the box once it's been purchased.

• Keep a separate list for Santa gifts and stocking stuffers.

• Create a wrapping center. This can be a basket, a caddy, or a rolling cart. Whatever it is, make it easy to keep all your supplies together and easy to transport to wherever you like to wrap. It’s such a simple thing, but collecting all the tools is usually  half the battle. The other half is finding which Hallmark Christmas movie you want to watch while wrapping. 😉

5. Let’s simplify planning, tracking, & remembering years past.

I love my notes app on my phone. Anything I do, I write up a little retrospective with tips so I remember next time. I have a Christmas folder with notes about everything from the best candy for gingerbread houses, to when I should get tickets to our favorite holiday events and what quantities of potatoes and cheese I should buy for our Christmas Day Raclette tradition. 

Having an easy-to-reference folder has made everything easy and allowed me to avoid making the same mistake twice and easily repeat the wins.

And finally… let’s simplify JOY.

Joy is such a beautiful thing. The holiday season at its core is about joy. And yet, as the primary caregivers (typically women) with our inherent mothering nature, we take 99.99% of the mental load to create the joy for everyone around us... often little consideration for our own enjoyment. Before this holiday season gets any further along, take a moment to step back and identify one thing that truly brings YOU joy during the holidays. Make that a top priority, and make it easy.

When organizing for clients, training my team of organizers, or teaching others how to organize, my number one tip for getting started is identifying the biggest pain point. Once the pain point has been identified, I urge whoever is doing the organizing to create simple systems around eliminating the pain point. It really is as simple as that. Backpacks always on the floor? Put up hooks. Big bin of tangled cords? Eliminate the ones you don’t need, wrap the ones you do, and store them in a way that they are easy to find. Any pain point can be easily broken down and solved for.

The same goes for joy. Does anything on your family’s bucket list bring you joy? Is there a daily ritual that allows you to feel calm and pampered? My warm chocolate drink in the morning, decorating my house on November 1, hosting my cookie exchange party, and reading Christmas stories by the tree are probably the most joyful things I do for myself during the holiday season.

One year we were so busy I realized that we had only read a handful of Christmas stories during December. I was so sad as I was packing up our Christmas items to realize that there really isn’t time for everything and I had let one of my favorite things of the season get overshadowed. So this year, as I’m hanging on to the last shreds of little kid mom life, you better believe we are reading Christmas books every night.

This season I wish you more joy, more intention, tempered expectations for yourself and your family, meaningful traditions that don’t drain you… and a happy new year.

Jen is the founder of Reset Your Nest, a Professional Home Organizing Business in Utah (servicing Salt Lake City, Park City, Ogden, Alpine, Highland, Mapleton, and St. George). She loves creating order and systems out of chaos and is known for bringing a beautiful aesthetic as well as easy to maintain function to any space. She shares her tips and tricks on Instagram @reset_your_nest.