The Scientific Reason for Clutter

    
Winter has arrived here in Montana! We got several inches of snow over the weekend with highs in the teens. A nice time to stay in and cook my pumpkin and try my hand at some gluten-free recipes: Pumpkin Pie and Pumpkin Muffins. Happily, they were good! In the process, I made huge messes in my kitchen, which illustrates the topic for today: Entropy, a law of science. Nancy Harris's amusing article describes an experience known to us all.


"It was then, as I struggled to scrub a bathroom only to return to a sink full of dishes in a previously-clean kitchen; or as I folded a pile of laundry and, upon finishing, discovered an open box of cereal dumped across the living room floor, cereal bowls on the counter and a stack of papers scattered across the kitchen table, that I realized just how very relevant entropy was.

You see, entropy has to do with steady deterioration, measures of disorder and overall tendencies toward chaos. And it isn’t just a crazy theory. Heavens no. It is law. Big law — as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics big. And what is more, it doesn’t state that order must always decrease. Oh, you can produce order all right — highly elaborate order even — only in doing so, disorder will increase somewhere else.

And there’s the key. Go ahead: clean and scrub, sort and organize, produce spectacular order in one area of your home; just understand and accept the fact that there will certainly be order decreasing, every bit as spectacularly, somewhere else in your home — especially if you have children or pets, or maybe even a husband (bless his heart).

There are likely some of you out there reading this and thinking smart little thoughts like, “You didn’t explain this right at all,” and “It has nothing to do with clutter. This is about energy, for crying out loud! It’s about thermodynamics and closed systems!”

But the rest of you are surely thinking, as I have thought all these many years, “Finally! A purely scientific explanation for why my house cannot stay tidy!” Blame it on entropy. Blame it on science. You and your home are simply subject to a greater law — a law of messiness, if you will.

Comfort yourself in knowing that those friends and neighbors of yours who seem to have a home void of dust, clear of any sign of fingerprints on walls and windows, and completely lacking in piles of laundry and unsorted mail, certainly have chaos and disorder somewhere else. You might have to search under their beds or open every drawer in their kitchen, but that disorder is there. Somewhere. It has to be ….

Unless, of course, they are superheroes who can defy the very laws of nature. And if that is the case, well, there is no use comparing yourself to them anyway."


More on clutter:
Three Steps to Organizing Your Child's Room (print version) (Kindle version)
Three Steps to Decluttering (print version) (Kindle version)
Declutter Any Room in 3 Weeks

Getting Organized for Thanksgiving

    
We haven't decided yet where we'll have Thanksgiving this year - at our house or our daughter's. Nevertheless, wherever it is, I'm sure we'll both be pitching in to pull it off. 

What about you? Hosting Thanksgiving this year? Don't despair - there's plenty of help out there! 

Disney Printable Planner 
Even Micky and Minnie can help. Disney offers a Thanksgiving printable planner with several different lists, including a countdown schedule for Thanksgiving Day.  

 

Thanksgiving 101

If you're a novice, or are feeling a little inadequate in some area, Taste of Home offers Thanksgiving 101. They have tutorials on everything from making gravy to setting the table . 

Thanksgiving Survival Guide
And here's a Thankgsiving Survival Guide written by Aviva Goldfarb on Cozi: 

"I get the jitters before hosting almost any gathering. But with all the build-up to Thanksgiving, it feels like the stakes are even higher than usual. To keep it in perspective, I try to remember what is most important-to be with family and friends and appreciate our blessings. But if I'm hosting the feast, I still have a lot of work to do! I've devised some strategies for making the evening easier on us, while still indulging our guests:  

Don't try to do it alone 
Just because I love to cook, doesn't mean I have to do it all! If anyone volunteers to bring something, I take them up on it. I also try to involve the kids with the preparation, either by asking them to make place cards or table decorations, or clean the house. (A friend of mine cherishes the Thanksgiving tablecloth her kids made on which they traced their hands in fall colors and wrote what they were thankful for.) 

Make a menu ahead of time 
By the Sunday before the feast, I make a list of everything we are serving, from appetizers to coffee. I note who is making each item and when I need to start my assignments. I even jot down my daily tasks on my calendar.  

Grocery shop early 
I make a detailed grocery list (consulting the menu I've decided on) and buy the groceries by Tuesday, so I can start cooking on Wednesday.  

Cook in advance 
Most of the trimmings can be cooked well in advance of dinner, and then warmed before the meal. Even the turkey can be finished cooking (we even slice it!) hours before the meal. (Just put that Norman Rockwell image of the father cutting the bird at the table out of your mind!)  

Get the house and table ready the night before 
To avoid exhaustion on the big day, I make sure the house looks nice and the table is set before I go to bed on Wednesday.  

Keep appetizers easy 
Before dinner, I serve simple foods, such as gourmet cheeses, nuts, store-bought gourmet spread for crackers, vegetables and dip, and fresh popcorn.  

Send the kids out for a picnic and sports before the meal 
This strategy, suggested by my friend and colleague, Jeanne Rossomme, frees the kitchen for the big feast, and calms the kids so there is a higher probability of civilized behavior when guests arrive. Have plastic containers ready so you can pack up leftovers This makes clean-up easier. But save a slice of cooked turkey breast for next week's recipe for turkey pot pie!  

Take the last thirty minutes off 
An experienced hostess once told me that I should try to hold sacred the last half hour before guests arrive. I use this time to get myself cleaned up and put my feet up for a few minutes. That way I'm not utterly exhausted before the evening begins.  

Give thanks and eat slowly 
After sitting down, each guest shares one thing for which they are thankful. This simple tradition really sets the right mood. Then we enjoy the feast we've all helped to prepare, and we try to remember to savor the time together after all our hard work." 

Happy Planning!! 

More on Thanksgiving:
Organizing Your To Do List
Everything You Need to Know to Pull Off Thanksgiving
Three Steps to Planning Dinner

Websites to Help You Organize School, Church, and Team Activities

Great article by Heather Alexander of Knoxnews reviews a couple of websites that help parents and teachers organize activities, volunteers and group gifts. 

"I've never been a room mom. And though I support my daughter, her teacher and our school, I have NO desire to be the point person for the classroom.

I'm disorganized, and I know it. I try to overcome it by hunting down tools that make organizing things easier.

Recently, I have come across two really useful websites.
SignUpGenius is a free website that helps parents stay organized by signing up electronically for duties.

You can sign up for an account at www.signupgenius.com, enter a list of email addresses for the parents of classmates or members of a team. Once you have that, you can invite the people on your list to sign up for things.

For example, a teacher could use it to set up parent-teacher conferences, a room mother could use it to organize parents to be the weekly mystery reader, and parents of kids who play sports could use the site to organize snacks and drinks for practices and games. It even has reminders that automatically get sent out prior to the commitment.

SignUpGenius was created by a dad who organized a church function where the food and drink sign-ups went horribly wrong. "I kept thinking to myself ... there has got to be a better way. So I set out to create one," said SignUpGenius founder Dan Rutledge.

The other helpful site is www.FrumUs.com.

I had never heard of it until recently when I got an invitation to contribute to a gift for A. L. Lotts Elementary School's third-grade teacher and cross country coach Jessica Greer.

I clicked on the link and discovered the site provides a way to collect money online from a group of people for a gift.

To use the site, you establish an account and add an email list. Then you can start a collection and invite people from your email list to give to the group gift.

There are no fees for this and no minimum amount required. The money that is collected can be used to purchase gifts or gift cards from the company's website, which includes dozes of retailers such as Amazon, Gap and Walmart.

This would be a great tool to collect for a group gift to a teacher and would work for a birthday or for a shower gift as well.

A mom created this site after she realized no one had collected money to get a gift for her son's baseball coach at the end of the season.

So, the ingenuity of one mom and one dad are meeting the very real needs of disorganized parents everywhere. And I, for one, am grateful."

More on family organizing:

Center'd Planning Website

Get Organized for Your Vacation with Trip Doc App

Three Steps on Time Management for the Stay-at-Home Mom

My New Book is Free - Twelve Steps to Destressing Christmas!

      
I've just released my new book Twelve Tips for Destressing Christmas on Kindle! And it's free through November 7! Twelve Tips for Destressing Christmas helps you plan an intentional, meaningful, and peaceful Christmas. It's a small book for the organizationally overwhelmed, as are all my organizing books - each addressing only one topic at a time. 

So stop by Kindle and pick it up. I'd be delighted if you passed this on to your friends and family. :)

 

Best Practices for Organizing Gmail

Jill Duffy in PCMag's Get Organized offers the following advice for organizing your Gmail. 

Gmail is one of the most popular email services. Whether you use it for personal communication, work, or both, you'll get more out of it if you understand how a few core features work.

This edition of Get Organized, a weekly series, explains a couple of Gmail's signature features and explains how best to use them to keep your email account effectively organized so you can be more productive.

Message Threads
As all Gmail users know, a continuous email exchange gets stacked into a thread. The number of messages in a thread always appears in parentheses next to the summary of names on the exchange, a thread count, if you will. 

 
The message thread is one of my favorite features of Gmail because when six people reply to one single group email, all I see is one unread thread rather than six unread messages. What I internalize is that there is a discussion that requires me attention. If I see six unread messages, I instead get the feeling that six things require my attention.

When you open a thread, messages that you've already read remain collapsed, while unread messages expand.

Best practice: One of the best tricks in managing threads is to keep them intact as long as they don't deviate off topic. When they do change topic, start a new thread simply by changing the subject line when you reply. You don't have to start a whole new message. All the recipients will be included in the new thread, and the history of your communication will still be archived within the message itself, under the ellipsis that says "show trimmed content" when you hover over it (see below), so anyone can reference it.

Labels
If there were one single feature that signifies Gmail, it would be labels. The way to understand labels is to describe what they are not: folders. Labels in Gmail often look like folders, and to some extent they achieve the same end. But labels are fundamentally different than folders, and mistaking them for folders will really limit what you can do with Gmail.

Let me start by explaining a little bit about folders. Email folders, often designed in a tree structure with the ability to add sub-folders, work similar to how real-world folders do. You file things into them. If you have a message to file, you can only file it into one folder.

Labels in Gmail look an awful lot like folders at first glance. When you create a new label, it appears on the left rail, similar to where you'll see folders (with default settings anyway) in Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Outlook. These Gmail labels can have colors assigned to them, too, making them look even more like folders.

So what's the difference?

Any given message thread can have more than one label, such as "work," "October 2012," and "urgent." Gmail also gives you two labels automatically: stars and "important," designated by a yellow tag on the left side of messages that are sent directly to you, i.e., not listservs, advertisements, or other mass mailing.

Think of labels more like tags. And the visual labels that you see on the left rail—think of those as a quick button to sort all the messages that have a certain tag. Note that even your inbox is just a label. When you click on a label on the left rail, you'll see new text automatically appear in the search box at the top.

This text is helping to refine your search to only messages with the label in question. Remember, Google is the company behind Gmail, and Google that company was founded as a search tool.

Best practice: Use labels in Gmail liberally because they aren't a substitute for folders, but rather a way to categorize or tag items and make them more searchable.

Power users should explore the Settings area to configure more advanced labeling attributes. For example, you can set up rules or filters to divert certain kinds of mail to a label, and have that label show up in your left pane only when it contains unread messages.

More on organizing email:

A very simple filing system for email and paper

Declutter Your Inbox by Forwarding Responsibly

Five Tips on How Writers Can Organize Their Constant Stream of Information


 

Destressing Christmas - Freeze-Ahead Recipes

     
As it gets closer to Christmas, life gets more hectic. It becomes harder to put a healthy meal on the table with Christmas programs, shopping, and parties added to your already busy schedule.

If you have the opportunity, double up on some freezable meals or partial meals.  Some recipes that lend themselves to doubling and freezing are: taco meat, spaghetti sauce, lasagna, chili, soup, baked ziti, and meatloaf. 

If you're making breads, make two loaves and freeze one for your family later or for gifts.  

If you make Christmas cookies, make up the cookie dough now for the kinds of cookies your family likes. Freeze it in small batches - I like to flatten the dough in gallon zip-lock bags, so they stack nicely in the freezer. Then when it's time to have fresh Christmas cookies, take out what you need, form into cookies, and bake. Most of the work is already done!

By working ahead now, your freezer recipes may save the day when life gets more hectic!

More on cookies:

Cookies, Cookies, Cookies

Time-Saving Steps For Rolled/Cut Out Cookies

Getting a Jump on Christmas Cookies

Use the Chore Quotient Before You Buy to Prevent Clutter

    
Pat Jeffries of the Oregonian has come up with a formula to keep us from buying items that will just sit on the shelf. It's called a Chore Quotient. Read on ...

"We all know that the best way to fight clutter is to bring fewer things into the house, but that's easier said than done. Still, there's one category of stuff that's especially crucial to keep out -- those things that from the start are doomed to end up gathering dust. 

'From the start,' of course, is with the benefit of hindsight, when we look back and realize we never should have bought that breadmaker or chain saw.  But it can often be hard, when we're caught up in buying mode, to see that the thing will never pan out for us.

So, the Chore Quotient is one way to identify at least a subgroup of  things that are best left on the store shelves. It's a measure of the item's potential for creating chores. Here's my formula:

Chore Quotient = Time required to maintain the item multiplied by degree of displeasure or difficulty (on a scale where 1 is pleasant and 10 is unbearable). The higher the CQ, the less likely you are to keep up with using it. 

That might mean clothing or linens that require ironing or dry cleaning; dishware that must be hand-washed; bird feeders that need regular cleaning to protect avian health; and so on.

For me, high-CQ items tend to be power tools, which I buy in an effort to make tasks easier. But if a tool isn't intuitive to use -- if I have to review the manual when I haven't used the tool for a while -- then, usually quite soon, it will fade into the background and never be used again. Result: money lost, clutter gained. Then there are the books I buy to learn something that I think I should know but that bores me; those books linger reproachfully on the shelf, unread. 

Your own high-CQ items may be quite different, but the general idea applies.  When you're about to buy something, in addition to the usual questions about the item's cost-benefit ratio and ecological footprint, ask whether it will be a chore to use or maintain, and if so, how annoying a chore. This judgment is, necessarily, subjective. Take, for example, adopting a pet: This may add a lot of chores, but since most of them are pleasant (brushing a cat, walking a dog), the CQ for many of us seems low. (OK, disposing of that dead mouse on your doorstep isn't fun, but nothing's perfect.)

So, next time you're tempted to buy, especially some big-ticket item, pause and take a mental peek at the future. You just might change your mind." 

More on preventing clutter:

Zero Trash in a Year - Could You Do It?

An Easy Way to Change Your Address or Eliminate Unwanted Paper Mail

6 Ways to Prevent Yourself from Bringing Clutter Home

Martha Stewart's Clever Pan Storage

I saw this on Martha Stewart and thought it was a clever and outside-the-box idea for storing pans. I do hate having to pick up baking pans in order to get to the one I want. My only concern is whether you'd be able to store as many pans and baking dishes as when you nest them.

"Stacking pans as opposed to nesting them means you can remove one without having to remove them all. Turn a vertical bakeware organizer on its end and secure it to the cabinet wall with cable clips to prevent toppling."

More on kitchen storage:

Containerizing Your Kitchen

Get Organized Month - Organize Your Refrigerator Freezer

I'm Quoted in Kitchen Clean-Up Article!

Destressing Christmas - Tackle Toy and Other Clutter Now

          
Christmas can add clutter to your home, especially to your child's room. To head it off, declutter now!

This is a great time of year to encourage your child to declutter toys before being inundated with more! Before a birthday is another good time to declutter. Even three- and four-year olds can grasp the concepts of outgrown toys, generosity, and order.

How to encourage your child to get rid of excess:

- Help your child envision giving toys to a younger friend or sibling, a disadvantaged child, your church or a charity. One of our foster daughters kept picturing her clothes making a younger child happy, which motivated her to get rid of four bags of clothes!

- Be sensitive to your child's sentimental favorites, yet help him learn to discriminate between favorites and toys that have lost their appeal.

- If your child is having difficulty, make it a two-step process. One of our daughters agreed to putting a bag of stuffed animals in the attic. After several months, she was able to part with many of them.

- Determine beforehand how much toy storage your child's room will allow or how much storage you will allow. These may be two different things! Just because a room has space, doesn't mean it needs to be jam-packed! When you're out of storage space, toys must be discarded or put away. (We put a way two-thirds of our girls' toys and swapped out toys three times a year.)

- Create limits - so many of one type of toy. If a new one comes in, an old one goes out.

- Discard broken toys or those that have missing pieces.

If your child declutters a couple of times a year, excess will be controlled, and her room will be manageable and pleasant. 

Make sure your child has a system - a place for books, a place for larger toys (I recommend shelves), bins or boxes for toys with many parts, a place for collections or special items, and a place for papers, a trash can, and a laundry basket. In my opinion, large toy boxes create frustration - your child cannot easily find toys or tries to yank out tangled toys creating breakage. 

Don't stop decluttering until there is no clutter and the room is peaceful. When Christmas comes, there will be adequate space for your child's new toys!
 
Set aside time each day for your child to maintain the system - time to make the bed, put away toys, throw away trash, put clothes in the laundry basket, etc.

Now on to the rest of the house! Before you clutter your house with Christmas decorations, cards, extra food, etc., clear out unnecessary stuff. If you have four weeks before Thanksgiving, divide your home into four areas and tackle one area each week. If it's three weeks, divide your house into three areas, and so on.

As you comb through each area, ask yourself if you've used it recently, if it adds value to your life, if you love it, if it has a home. If not, consign it, toss it, or donate it.  

For those things you want to keep, find homes for them with similar items. Use double-duty furniture and accessories that provide storage as well as function - an ottoman with storage inside, end tables with drawers or shelves, or decorative bins or baskets that hold smaller items. Keep decluttering until your home gives you peace of mind.

What a nice way to start Christmas preparations with a lean house! 

If you need more extensive help decluttering, check out Three Steps to Decluttering or Decluttering Any Room in 3 Weeks.


More on decluttering:
Three Steps to Decluttering 

More Help - Teaching Your Kids to Declutter

Decluttering Any Room in 3 Weeks

Clever Event - Shredding, Tax Advice and Food Bank Donations

        
Someone in Oro Valley, Arizona had a great idea: combining shredding with tax advice and providing an opportunity to donate to the local food bank. Here's what they're doing:   

"Get rid of old documents safely at a free community shredding event Saturday, Nov. 10.  It will be held from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. at Oro Valley Marketplace, at Oracle Road and Tangerine.

Tax professionals from the Southern Arizona Chapter of Enrolled Agents (SACEA) will provide information on how long to keep tax records, as well as year-end tax planning tips and how to save money with Arizona tax credits.

Shredding will be done by Shred-It Arizona for free, but a suggested minimum donation of $5 per box and/or three cans of food to the Marana Community Food Bank is requested. The Food Bank will have representatives at the shedding event to receive donations of money and canned goods.  Cash donations may qualify for a “dollar-for-dollar” tax credit."

Why not organize such an event in your community?

More on shredding and taxes:

Some of My Favorite Organizing Products - My Heavy Duty Shredder

National Simplify Your Life Week - 5 Simple Tips

Color-Coded Taxes

Reducing Visual Clutter Might Help People with Early Alzheimer's

        
I found the following enlightening article which might be of interest to those who have family members or friends who have early stage Alzheimer's. An interesting correlation between Alzheimer's and clutter.

"For individuals with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, memory problems may be due, in part, to having trouble noticing the differences between similar objects, according to researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Toronto.
 
The findings support growing research which suggests that a part of the brain once believed to support memory only — the medial temporal lobe — also plays a role in object perception.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. For the study, researchers asked MCI patients to look at two rotated, side-by-side pictures, and tell if they were different or identical.

In one episode, many photos of the same thing (a blob-like object) were shown. The photos varied only slightly when they weren’t a perfect match, either by shape, color or fill pattern. During these high-interference photos, MCI patients struggled greatly to pinpoint identical objects.

In another episode, the blob-like objects appeared with photos in which non-matches were more extreme and varied widely. For example, a picture of a butterfly was shown next to a photo of a microwave. Mixing the very similar blob-like objects with photos of dissimilar objects greatly reduced the amount of interference.

'Minimizing the degree of perceptual interference improved patients’ object perception by reducing the number of visually similar features,' said project leader Rachel Newsome, a University of Toronto Ph.D. student and Georgia Tech graduate.

The results indicate that, under certain circumstances, reducing 'visual clutter' might help MCI patients perform everyday activities.
For example, telephone buttons tend to be the same size and color. Only the numbers are different — a very slight visual difference for a person who struggles with object perception. Perhaps a phone with varying sized buttons and different colors would help.

'Not only does memory seem to be very closely linked to perception, but it’s also likely that one affects the other,' said Toronto’s Morgan Barense, Ph.D. 'Alzheimer’s patients may have trouble recognizing a loved one’s face not only because they can’t remember it, but also because they aren’t able to correctly perceive its distinct combination of features to begin with.'

MCI patients weren’t the only ones who struggled during the study. Individuals at-risk for MCI, people who had previously shown no signs of cognitive impairment, performed about the same as those with MCI.  

This suggests that the perception test could be used as an early indicator of cognitive decline.

'People often associate MCI and dementia solely with memory impairment,' said  Audrey Duarte, Ph.D., one of the study’s authors. 'Memory and perception appear to be intertwined in the same area of the human brain.'"

More on clutter and the brain: 

Keeping Your Memory Sharp

Clutter and the Brain - Dr. Peter Whybrow

Clutter in Your House or Office Means Clutter in Your Mind

Destressing Christmas - Christmas Card Tips

Sending out Christmas cards can seem like an overwhelming and costly task. But if you start early, it can remove some of the stress in December. Here are some ways to make sending out Christmas cards more doable.

- Send out digital Christmas cards or letters to as many people as possible. I know this offends some, but at least your message gets out. I like sending and receiving letters - catching up with our friends. When I receive a Christmas card with only a signature, I know my friends are alive, but that's about all!

You can email your letters or you can use an email service, like iContact.

If you have a blog, you can post your Christmas letter on your blog, too. If you want to get fancy, you could make a video Christmas greeting and put the link on your social networks. 

- If you write a Christmas letter, make it no longer than one side of a page. It's cheaper to print and most people won't read more than that. It forces you to be economical with your words! 

- Use your TV time or traveling time (if you're the passenger!) to address Christmas cards. You're doubling your time while enjoying yourself, too!

- Get the family involved. Your family members can help fold, stuff, seal, and stamp your cards and letters.

- In January, update your snail mail Christmas card list as you sort through your Christmas cards. Then you're set when it comes time to send out your cards next year.

However you do Christmas cards, your friends and family will love to hear from you! 

More on Destressing Christmas:

Destressing Christmas - Considering the Needs of Your Family and Friends

Destressing Christmas - Smart Gift Giving

Destressing Christmas - Planning an Intentional Christmas

Decluttering Your Office? Where to Donate Excess Office Supplies

    
Pens multiply like rabbits! If you're decluttering your office and find that you have excess office supplies, don't toss them. Donate them! 

We may not readily think of office supplies as something to donate, right? Who wants donated office supplies, anyway? Plenty of organizations:

- Libraries

- Animal Shelters

- Your child's school. If you don't have a child in school, go to AdoptAClassroom.org to find a classroom where your donation will be appreciated. 

- Your favorite charity. Your donation can reduce the amount they must spend on office supplies. 

 So before you toss, think about donating those office supplies. Your excess can be a blessing to organizations on strict budgets.

More on donating: 

Donate Your Bikes to Youth Bike-Refurbishing Programs

Donating Business Clothing for Job Interviews

Virtual Thrift Store Helps You Clear Clutter and Benefit Charities, Too 

Overwhelmed with Decluttering?

Do you find that you are overwhelmed with a decluttering task? Me, too! I know ... I'm a professional organizer. I'm not supposed to feel that way. But I do.

My husband and I started going through his parents mementos three or four weeks ago. We made great progress, but didn't finish the job. Our guest room has several categories piled around the room. It wouldn't take much to finish, but we have a mental block. Can you relate?

To overcome our mental block, we're going to attack it in 30-minute blasts. We can do anything for 30 minutes! And it will probably only take a couple of blasts for us to complete the job.

It's funny how we get close to the end of a project and lose steam. If you have the same problem, blast away with 30-minute attacks.

More on decluttering:

Three Steps to Decluttering on Kindle and in print

A Dozen Tips for Staying Clutter-Free in 2011

Announcing: Declutter Any Room in 3 Weeks!

Destressing Christmas - Considering the Needs of Your Family and Friends

     
I'm very excited about Christmas this year because our daughter who lives in Kazakhstan will be able to come home for Christmas, which is an unusual occurrence! And celebrating with our new granddaughter will be such fun! 

So I'll have a lot to think about in planning Christmas this year and I want to make sure that the needs of those we will include in our celebrations will be considered. By using this as a filter, we can reduce some holiday stress. 

Here are a few ideas:

- Choose with whom you want to spend time over the holidays - friends or family who refresh, encourage, and cheer you. Take the initiative to make that happen.

Do you have friends who might be alone whom you could include in your holiday plans? Have you included a healthy amount of giving to others who might otherwise be neglected? Your heart will overflow with joy as you reach out to others! It doesn't need to be expensive, just something that says you're thinking about them.

If getting together with your relatives is too painful or unhealthy, give yourself permission not to attend. If you, your spouse, or your children might be subjected to verbal, emotional or physical abuse, don't put yourselves in this unsafe place. Even if it hurts others' feelings, you cannot condone unhealthy or painful treatment by attending.

- Consider family problems when planning gatherings. Be proactive in order to minimize Uncle John's drinking problem by having a brunch rather than a dinner. If Cousin Sally's conversation is predominantly negative or a never-ending flow, plan some conversation starters or games to reduce her dominance.

- If it's just too difficult for you to travel during the holidays, don't let others guilt-trip you into traveling anyway. Be honest and stick to your guns for your own benefit and that of your family. Invite your relatives to visit you (if that is better for you) or suggest another time of year for a visit when life is less hectic.

- Consider the needs of your nuclear family. If you have small children who need naps and a consistent bedtime (who doesn’t qualify for that one?!!), don’t over-schedule. Make sure the events you plan to attend are age appropriate for your children. Don’t have an unrealistic idea of what they can grasp and endure.

- Study your family. Know what delights each one and what stresses each one, including yourself. Plan accordingly. When our girls were small, one of our daughters would respond to an over-planned schedule by vomiting - a pretty clear message! (Sorry to be graphic.) So I had to be careful not to pack our schedule too tightly.

One of our daughters loved to help my husband get the tree in the stand and put the lights on. The other one did not! So we did not include it as a family event, but chose other things they both liked, like the Christmas Eve service at our church.

By anticipating your needs and those of your family and friends, you can be intentional about your holidays. You’ll be able to weed out those items that don’t fit, plan around potential hazards, and create memorable experiences for those you love.

More on Christmas:

Destressing Christmas, Part 8, 2009 - An Online Tool to Consolidate Wishlists

Easy Decadent Fudge Recipe

Destressing Christmas, Part 10 - Efficient Shopping and Online Tips