Simple Ways to Simplify Your Holiday

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 is quite the production and that is part of the fun...until it’s not. Finding some balance this holiday season by doing a few of these simple things...

Turn off your 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. 

Do your own kind of giving.  You don't need to follow that calendar you found on Pinterest, or from your church. I realize that everyone has good intentions with giving here and giving there, and we all want to give everywhere. The thing is, it wears me out physically and emotionally and then I have nothing to give to the people that matter most to me.  Please, don’t get me wrong, it’s great and good and wonderful...until it has me running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to produce these magical experiences for my kids. Instead, I’ve looked around to see where I can help and give a little more and we’ve just done that.  It's enough. You're offering is enough. It doesn't need to be elaborate to be enough.

Keep your wrappings simple. I honestly love a beautifully wrapped gift. 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. 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.