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Christmas Countdown and preparation tips

It’s Countdown to Christmas time. School break will be here, kids will be hyper and excited – with too much time on their hands – and adults are feeling stressed out because they feel like they don’t have enough time to do all the things they want to get done before the big day.

So how do you avoid getting knocked off balance?

Well, now’s the time to give your expectations a hard-nosed reality check.

Take a few quiet minutes (after the kids’ bedtime or before their waking up time) to think carefully about what you are expecting to happen and what you are committing yourself to accomplish these last few days.

Is it realistic?

Children need more adult attention and companionship the last week before Christmas. 

That is reality.      

More reality: Christmas Countdown

Kids don’t handle marathon shopping expeditions well at all. 

Eating lots of sugary food makes kids hyperactive. 

Getting exposed to lots of advertising makes children dissatisfied and discontented

(That is what advertising is designed to do – make you dissatisfied, make you want more).

The lack of a regular healthy routine of chores, mealtimes, rest times, and bedtimes makes it hard for kids to settle down. Or to feel secure.  This is especially true during times of high stress.

Keeping all this in mind, here is the Bottom-Line Reality:

Your world won’t fall apart if you lower your expectations a little and don’t get everything done that you planned to do this year for Christmas.

You and your family will survive the holidays (and life!) better if you accept imperfection.

First, you need to Keep Up – not with everything. Just with the basics.

It’s true that you usually have to put housework on hold while you get ready for the holidays. But it just doesn’t work to let everything go completely while you focus all your attention on kids and holiday preparations.

It’s amazing how soon a family can become paralyzed by a mountain of messiness when they ignore day-to-day chores.

So you just have to learn to recognize your minimum daily requirements for keeping control of clutter and undoneness.

Organization expert Bonnie McCullough recommends that you keep up with laundry and dirty dishes, and decide what to feed the family for dinner by 10 o’clock each day (by 10 a.m. if you are at home during the day, by 10 p.m. the night before if you will be gone).

Then prevent clutter from spreading by spending a focused five minutes picking up daily in each room of the house (10 minutes in the kitchen).

Third, arrange now –  before school lets out –  to trade kids with a friend.

Set up an agreement to babysit a friend’s kids in exchange for having them babysit yours. Then set aside all your adult-only holiday preparations for a full or half day to focus attention on your friend’s kids and your own.

Include your kids in your holiday preparations.

Every year as your kids get older, they will be able to participate in more and different ways. So be on the lookout for things they can do to help and enrich the celebration through their suggestions, abilities, special talents and developing interests.

For example:

House decorations

Kids can arrange the figures in a Christmas creche and help decorate the tree. Assign one child to display each day’s delivery of Christmas cards on a door, wall, or banister. Show kids how to make snowflakes, paper chains, or different kinds of garlands for the Christmas tree, hallway, doorway or stairway.

(Suggestions for garlands: string white styrofoam packing squiggles or colored marshmallows on yarn, or string alternating pieces of popcorn with raw cranberries.)

If you don’t want the children’s decorations in your living spaces, let them decorate their own bedrooms.

Put up a paper tree on a wall or door and let them make their own ornaments after they have festooned the room with paper chains and garlands.

Set out art supplies for kids to make tree ornaments (if your kids are little, you’ll need to make the ornaments with them):

Using cookie cutters, trace holiday shapes on cardboard, thin foam sheets, or felt. Decorate with glitter, foil, or scraps of lace and other trim from your sewing box. Use ornament hooks to hang sour gumdrop type fruit candies or white-chocolate-covered pretzels.

Make ornaments from cornstarch clay with this recipe: Combine 2 cups baking soda, 1 cup cornstarch, and 1 ¼ cups cold water in a saucepan. Stir until smooth. Then bring to a boil and simmer one minute, stirring until the clay is as thick as mashed potatoes.

Pour onto a tray and cover with a damp cloth until the clay is cool enough to knead it lightly, and mold it into shapes or roll it out on waxed paper and cut it with cookie cutters. Dry and paint.

Look online to find ideas for simple gifts you know your kids can make at their age and level of development with materials you have on hand.

Give kids supplies to make gift wrap, gift tags, and table decorations

Let them use crayons, magic markers, or printing techniques to decorate personalized gift wrap paper, and make gift tags by tracing around cookie cutters on old Christmas cards or heavyweight colored paper.

To decorate the Christmas table, kids can make placemats, place cards, and centerpieces. A walk outside to find pinecones and evergreen cuttings may be just what kids need to burn off energy before devising a creative centerpiece.

Let kids help with holiday greetings

Children enjoy sealing envelopes, sticking on stamps, and making one-of-kind holiday greeting cards using a variety of drawing, printing, and other art techniques.

Some children might enjoy addressing cards (I used to assign that job to my children as a penmanship exercise when we were home schooling.)

Share the holiday tastes of helping to make your Christmas treats

Most kids love helping make cookies, candies, fruitcakes, and other traditional holiday sweets. Let them crack nuts, measure ingredients, decorate cookies, etc.

When the treats are all baked, and all the batter spoons licked clean, kids also enjoy wrapping and delivering food gifts to friends and relatives.

School age kids can devise holiday entertainment

Budding actresses and actors enjoy dramatizing the Christmas story or figuring out original holiday skits. Even shy children who don’t care to perform for an audience may lose their bashfulness if they can hide behind a puppet screen to put on a puppet show.

The last day or two before Christmas, when the suspense is becoming unbearable, is a good time for children to use their  excess energy practicing skits and songs for entertaining guests.

© Becky Cerling Powers 1995 updated 2023

Use with attribution only [email protected]

For more insights from Becky Cerling Powers see her book Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive in the Bookstore