My Holidays: Simplified

We all love the holidays. The traditions. The food. The giving. Time to slow down and enjoy one another...except that rarely happens until the holiday is actually here and over. The lead up always seems to be quite the production.  I try to convince myself that that is part of the fun and it is...until it’s not. So this year, or this week at least, I'm finding some balance by doing these 3 simple things.

Turning off my phone. Now I know this isn’t totally realistic, but set aside some time each day where your phone is out of sight and out of reach. Mine is usually between 2:30-5:30. At first I thought that this wouldn’t work for me, with real estate transactions always in play, and there are times when it doesn’t, but for the most part, it does. Believe it or not, no one actually dies if they can’t reach me for an hour and a deal has never fallen apart because of it either. Shocker. 

Once you put your phone away, you’ll realize how much time you spend checking it. It’s a waste of so.much.time. and brain power. Not only that, when you’re not constantly seeing someone else’s elaborate Christmas vacation or over-the-top-tree or holiday family picture, you’re able to enjoy your own space so much more. For the record: all those people’s Christmas’ and family life look more similar to yours than you realize.

Trim the fat. We all have too many things on our to-do lists. Go ahead and give yourself permission to take two...or a dozen off that list. I’m sure they are all great and wonderful things, until you’re up all night trying to get them all done, yelling at your kids to ‘hurry up and help’. Perhaps my house is the only house that can get a touch too hectic and then we’ve really missed the point all together. 

Don’t have time for neighbor gifts? Stop doing them. Really. You’re neighbors are not keeping track of who is knocking on their door and dropping treats (if they are, that’s their own issue :)). They’ll still be your neighbors and if you really can’t handle the guilt of skipping neighbor gifts, just move your gift to Valentine’s Day and make that your thing. We all have too many neighbor gifts sitting on our counters anyway. 

Keep your wrappings simple. In all honesty, I love a beautifully wrapped gift & even better when it all coordinates with my tree. It’s probably more important to me than it should be so I try to get ahead of the game. Even still, every year I’m up until all hours on Christmas Eve. With a new baby, I know I can’t handle that this year. So I’m simplifying. I ordered these boxes on amazon — because I get tired of gift bags and I’m using a whole lot of bakers twine instead of ribbon. I have yet to hear any of my kids complain about the wrappings, I know this is my own personal thing I love, but this year, I'm scaling back.

On the flip side, I hope to gain a few more quiet moments -- I know my real challenge will be to not fill up any free time I've created with more stuff.  Instead, hopefully I'll get in a few games of HORSE on the new basketball hoop, that was delivered 2 weeks prior to Christmas.  How's that for a Christmas surprise. ha!