Being organised for Christmas is something I absolutely love to do. My routine starts on boxing day and it is never too early to get ahead and reduce your stress for the big day!
Reflection
Boxing day is a great place to start organising the following Christmas. While everything is at the front of your mind you can journal what went well, what you’d not do again and what you’d like to do differently next year.
Its also a great time to pick up some bargains if you have the space while gift wrap and cards are cheap. One year I bought plain paper for gift wrapping birthdays super super cheap so don’t just consider next Christmas if you’re braving the shops!
This is also a great time to write out your diary for the new year and consider any goals you have so that you hit the ground running after new year.
Food
Lots of people buy their dinner ingrediants at the last minute, then prepare and cook on the day but there is so much you can do to be organised in this area to save yourself some stress. We usually start planning our menu and buying bits for Christmas dinner around October time.
We use a shopping app called Bring, which you can use to create shopping lists amd share with others. This becomes especially handy at Christmas as you can extend this to people outside of your household. We create a Christmas shopping list, and put all the menu items here regardless of which store so that we can see whats still left to buy for the main dinner.
Meat can be bought fresh, and stored frozen for months with no deteriation to the quality so this is a great place to start! Not only the turkey or joint of meat you’re planning to cook, but your oigs in blankets and bacon lattice too. Just remember to set yourself a reminder to defrost on the 23rd December! Stuffing balls are another handy thing to freeze or alternatively keep some of you chipolatas back and freeze ready to add to stuffing.
Table sauces and jarred gravy are also something you can also buy in advance. I tend to buy these in October or November to help spread the cost of the dinner.
When it comes to vegetables, I’ve tried a few different ways over the years. The best ‘get ahead’ I’ve found is to pre-prepare and freeze your potatoes, but to leave other vegetables until closer to the day. Potatoes can be prepped and frozen in advance – I tend to parboil for 10 minutes, then strain and fluff for roasties, or leave as they are for mash. Simply spread evenly in 1 layer on a tray and open freeze so that the chunks freeze individually, then transfer to a bag for full freezing and storage, meaning you only need to cook the amount you need on the day, but you can have them handy for quick dinners throughout the year saving you from food waste. I like to freeze my roasties directly on disposable foil trays so that they can be cooked directly on Christmas day, and there is less washing up. Potatoes for mash get frozen in a bag ready to finish the boiling process on the day. You can either cook from frozen, or defrost on Christmas eve in the fridge.
Parboiling doesn’t need to be limited to potatoes either. Most vegetables can also be prepped, parboiled and frozen – just check online for some guidance if you’re unsure, or check for pre-frozen vegetables in the supermarket freezer aisles. Personally our family prefer fresh to prefrozen so we tend to grab ours in the run up to Christmas, prepare them all on Christmas eve and soak in water until the big day.
Cards
If you do decide to send cards, you can also look out for ways to make them more personal. Avery have a mass printing functionality on their website which works out pretty cheap for bulk orders, and Funky Pigeon often have codes that give you 50% off when you buy 5 or more (usually something like 50five or fifty5) which you can find with a quick Google search.
You could also consider donating money to charity and sending and E-Card (or WhatsApp a picture) to family and friends. The postal servuce have plenty work in December to keept them busy, or by not delivering them yourself will keep fuel costs down too! We always donate a meal each to our local hopeless food area to ensure someone gets a Christmas lunch, and this saves me 4+ hours of writing cards, allows me to connect with family by message and saves me delivering cards myself.
Traditions
If you have any family traditions, nows the time to be blocking out calendars, getting in supplies or making appointments! If you fancy some new traditions, nows the time to think about what you want to do and need for next year.
Calendar Planning
December gets hectic every year so I like to have a visable calendar for November and December and block out dates for certain things. For example, we always get a real tree so I always block the last Saturday in November for tree shopping, and the Sunday and Monday for tree decorating. This might change a little in the future, depending where the weekend falls, as Amelia’s birthday is late November but this year it works perfectly.
Advent Activities
Keep costs low and diaries free by limiting the number of advent activities you sign up to. To do this we have a bucket/wish list insteas of an advent calendar.
Christmas PJs
Now we’re in the matching crew, but this is really an expensive habit if your family is bigger. This year I’ve decided the matching PJs are going to be for December not just xmas eve. We always used to get new jarmies from the elves growing up but I think it will be nice this year if they brought them a little earlier for the start of advent so we’re switching up the tradition. We’ll make sure they’re washed ready for xmas eve so we get a little longer out of them. Maybe the elves will still bring new PJs, we’ll see!
I usually watch out for the supermarket drops for ours and click and collect. We’ve had some fantastic quality pjs at affordable prices from Asda over the years and they’ve become our go-to every year.
Christmas Eve
Gone are our days of Christmas eve at the pub with our mates! Now we need to start thinking about soms family friendly things to do haha. Some families have party food and stay home, some deliver christmas cards to relatives, others start the dinner preparations and in Europe they actually celebrate with the meal and gifts on Christmas eve and end the days celebrations with Midnight Mass. Whatever you and your family do, I’m sure it is very special!
I think our Christmas eve is likely to include some dinner prep, baking, bath and movies together as a family… so many possibilities.
I feel like Christmas eve boxes has become a fairly new trend, so I’m yet to decide what we’ll do to participate, as some things can be quite wasteful. I think we’ll have some magic reindeer dust to sprinkle, maybe new pjs (but not matching) or dressing gown, the elves will bring a story book (Twas the night before xmas, of course) and maybe some treats of some description like a funky bath bomb or something. Something pretty basic to build excitement for the big day.
Stocking Fillers
In our family, stocking fillers are one of our traditions so something that can easily be planned for. We always get an orange, a selection of chocolates and when we were little we used to get a set of new coins, so something we can easilynbe planned for.
Now we’re all grown up, we rotate who is responsible so they change a little but this year we have 2 littles so it will be interesting to see what Mam does with them this year.
Gifts
Setting up a gift budget is the perfect thing to do on Boxing day with direct debits – split the value into 11 or 12 and set up a standing order on pay day to make next year a little easier on the
I like to do my xmas shopping in the black friday sales so people get more for their money, so we gather little ideas in our spreadsheet all year round.
Most people buy gifts for the same people every year so there is a couple of things you can introduce to your life that will make things a bit easier.
Giftster – this is a great app and website to use to track gift ideas.
Secret Santa – if you regularly participate in a secret santa, this app can be reused year on year by the organiser and set rules if you need them.
Gift tracking – you have a couple of ways you can track either paper or using a basic spreadsheet. I like to keep a list for a couple of reasons. My first reason might shock you, I forget I’ve bought gifts and hidden them haha. Secondly, to help you track your budget.
Delivery tracking – Shop is a fab app to consolidate all your deliveries so that you know what is coming when, and if anything is missing and you need to contact the company. You can also keep a list, so you don’t lose track.
Cashback all the way
Topcashback (referral link) is a great app at Christmas time to earn a few extra pennies when doing your shopping! It isn’t always the fastest way to earn some cash but it can help with your savings towards Christmas – we tend to withdraw our years cashback and put it into our Christmas savings pot for the following year. We have currently earned over £65 in 2024, which we’ll withdraw and put towards Christmas 2025. If saving, being savvy or side hustling money is something you’re interested to hear more about, you might want to read my “Organised Finances” blog – coming soon!
Love, Jo-Anne x