Planning for an Organised Christmas

When my daughter was here the other day we were discussing Christmas activities. I said that I was considering not putting up any Christmas decorations this year because we have so much we need to accomplish in the house and when I added that to my sons illness it all seemed a bit much.

This year there will only be my husband, my son and myself here for Christmas.

My husband does not bother with Christmas decorations and my son is now 15 and his illness makes him sleep an average of 18 or 19 hours a day so I doubt he will even notice the difference.

So you see I can't get away with pretending that I just "do it for the kids"!

But my daughter pointed out that if I don't decorate it will make me miserable and that will make other people miserable too.

So today I sat down and started to make my plan.

I am going to spend the next two weeks carrying on with my cleaning, organising and de-cluttering of the house.

I avoid doing "stuff" on a Sunday so that gives me twelve days.... That's twice round the house and two shopping days.

The following six working days will be for decorations, get them out, put them up, put the boxes away.

That means the advent decorations will be out in time and the rest up and the mess tidied away by the first Monday in December.

That means from then till Christmas week I can concentrate on my big homemaking project which is to swap our bedroom into the largest room and make our old room into a room for fostering.

We did originally use the biggest room for fostering, but once we had a child in place I realised that I did not have anywhere to have my quiet time in peace.

The young man we had in place wanted a smaller room anyway so when he moved into another room I made the corner of the large room into my prayer place.

It is going to be a big job to get the two rooms as they should be, but if my decorations are up then I will have somewhere lovely to relax in between working on them.