How to get ahead with your Christmas decorating
In most households, the Christmas period is one marked by a certain tinge of chaos and rushed, last-minute preparations. While this is inevitable to a certain degree, you can absolutely take steps to limit just how stressful everything ends up being.
One aspect of that lies in getting ahead with your Christmas decorations, not only so that you have less to do at the last minute, but also so you can enjoy the decorations for longer. From looking into what you have already to delegating tasks, here’s how you can work on getting ahead.
Look at what you have already
Before you even start looking for new Christmas decorations, it’s important to check out what you have already. Take a look at those boxes that are packed away in the cellar, or in some corner in the attic. By assessing what you have to work with, you can make the planning process a whole lot easier, while also saving yourself time and money on buying new decorations.
Check specific sites
Rather than just looking in random shops and online stores for decorations, set yourself up for success by starting your search off as specifically as possible. Look for websites that have a dedicated Christmas range of decorations, so that you don’t have to trawl through a whole bunch of irrelevant items that are totally inappropriate for your decorative needs. This will speed things up a lot, and allow you to get ahead before you’ve even started out.
Set a budget
It’s easy to go a bit overboard with christmas decorating and end up spending far more than you’d initially planned. Combine that with travel costs and the expenses related to buying presents for family and friends, and you’ve got a bit of a potential budget disaster on your hands.
To prevent this from happening, we recommend setting a strict budget early on in the process and then sticking with it. List out what you can afford to spend overall and what you’ve already spent, detailing everything in a spreadsheet. Keep on checking in on the spreadsheet from time to time, so that you don’t accidentally end up missing things.
Involve family and friends
If you’re hosting Christmas for your friends and family, then don’t just accept that the entire burden should be yours and yours alone – get other people involved, both in planning and actually putting the decorations up.
You can give different people different roles to help keep things organised. For example, one person can do napkins, another can do candles, another bunting and so on. Like this, people have clear responsibilities that they know are theirs to take care of, dramatically increasing the chances that they get around to everything on time.
Keeping these tips in mind can really help to transform the overall Christmas experience. The great thing is that they’re not only applicable to Christmas – you can apply these same general tactics to any form of celebration, whether a wedding or birthday, with similar degrees of success.
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