5 Days of Preparing for the Holidays {decorating}

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It's that time of the year~time to start thinking of holiday decorations! Yes, I know it's only the first part of November, but now is the time to start planning. Don't wait until it's the first of December and you're already feeling overwhelmed.

I blogged recently about how overwhelmed I've been feeling so I am determined to have a plan of action to prepare for the holidays so that I can actually enjoy them and not feel stressed. My main plain of action is to spread out my decorating throughout this month. Especially since I have the added responsibility as a pastor's wife of making sure our church is decorated appropriately for the holidays, I need to make sure I'm planning well at home.

Here's my projected timeline:

The week of Nov. 5th (that's this week~yikes!!) put up my Dickens Village
The week of Nov. 12th put up decor around the house (except the kitchen which will be still be decorated for Thanksgiving)
The week of Nov. 19th relax and enjoy Thanksgiving with my family
The week of Nov. 26th decorate the kitchen and put up our Christmas trees (I still like for those to go up after Thanksgiving)
The month of December simply enjoy it all

I have a tendency to decorate a lot at the holidays~I know it's a lot of work, but I like it that way. It's so much fun to transform our home and my children absolutely LOVE it. So that makes it worth it for me. You can view some previous years' decorations here, here, here, and here.

However, when I try to do everything in one week and homeschool on top of that ...well, that's a meltdown in the making, my friends. Take my word for it: just don't do it.

So in preparation for starting to decorate this week I am very proud to say that we got our garage all cleaned up this past Saturday--can I get a "woot, woot!". That was a major feat because it was a royal mess. And I knew that I did not want to start dragging out my Christmas boxes through all that mess. Now it's all neat and tidy and I can easily get to my Christmas things whenever I need them. Less stress! Yea!

Now the key is to follow the plan, right?

What about you? Do you have a plan for your holiday decorating? I'd love to hear what works best for you.

This week I'm blog hopping along with my fellow Schoolhouse Review Crew mates. Join us all week long as we talk all about the holidays.

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