How to Reset Your Home and Mind Before the Holidays

If the holidays always seem to arrive before you feel ready for them, I want to help you reset before December. We’re going to get yourself, your home, calendar, meals, and mental load ready for the season ahead.

But the biggest reset I’m making this year is what I’m not doing this year. Because I realized I don’t actually want to do less Christmas. I want to do more of the Christmas we love: the cookies on the table, the same old Christmas music playing in the kitchen, beautifully wrapped presents, homemade gifts, cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, all those little things that eventually become the nostalgia our children remember.

Later I’m sharing the things I’m deliberately cutting out to make room for that.

1. Reset Yourself Before the Busy Season

Most importantly, you need to be fresh for the holidays. If you’re going into the season feeling burnt out, we need to pivot.

Before the season picks up, ask: What helps me feel like myself?

Reset things that give you life if they have fallen by the wayside, like:

• Getting consistent with Bible reading again
• Returning to a better sleep routine
• Reestablishing your normal rhythms
• Getting dressed in the morning
• Exercise

One little thing I’ve also been making room for again is reading. Lately, this has totally fallen off my radar and whenever this happens I try to just pick a book and keep it nearby and just read a page or two when I have a few quiet minutes.

One little comfort read I always come back to is Michael’s Gentle Wife. It’s the book I use to get back into reading again when I’ve lost that reading muscle because it’s just such a sweet, lighthearted book. It’s a story that portrays a unified Christian marriage and family, which is perfect for helping me get my mindset back on the kind of home I’m trying to create and the spirit I want to bring into our home during the holidays. It’s become such a comforting little book friend for me.

Question to ask yourself: What do I need to get back in place now so I’m not entering the holidays already depleted?

2. Reset the Practical Things Around the House

This is the part where I like to look around and ask: What is going to become annoying or stressful in December if I don’t deal with it now?

Wardrobe Prep

Check ahead of time whether everyone has:

• Church clothes
• Coats
• Shoes
• Holiday outfits
• Travel clothes

Write down the current sizes of the children so when you’re asked what size they are, you have that ready (this will go in your planner that we will talk about in the next section).

Food Preparation

Think beyond Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner and prepare for the ordinary meals that still have to happen during an unusually busy season.

You could prepare:

• Freezer meals in advance. I like to use my freezer meal plan to stock my freezer full of easy grab-and-go dinners and breakfasts.
• I make sure I have all the baking ingredients I’ll need for cookies and holiday baking stocked ahead of time, plenty of sugar and flour, and of course make sure the gang’s all here when it comes to spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, allspice, and cardamom.
• I also like to make and freeze cookie dough well in advance for all the Christmas cookies I’ll be making, so I can just pull it out of the freezer and bake whenever I need it.

Focus Your Cleaning on High-Impact Areas

Instead of trying to deep-clean every corner of your house, prioritize:

• Entryway
• Living room
• Kitchen
• Bathrooms

These are usually the spaces that affect how your home feels the most and the areas guests are most likely to use.

Create a Dedicated Gift and Wrapping Station

Keep together:

• Gifts you’ve already purchased
• Wrapping paper
• Tape
• Labels/tags
• Other wrapping supplies

Some people like to wrap presents as they come in but I personally don’t like to do that. I like to visually see everything I have for each person before I wrap them.

Question to ask yourself: What can I prepare around the house now that will make everyday life easier once the holidays get busy?

3. Reset the Mental Clutter

A huge part of holiday overwhelm is simply having too many unfinished thoughts floating around in your head.

You have to centralize all of it into one location. This becomes your external brain so your actual brain can be free to think and delight in the season.

Create One Holiday Planning Home Base

It can be a notebook, spreadsheet, planner, whatever you will actually use.

Keep things like:

• Gifts
• Traditions/Advent
• To-do lists
• Recipes
• Clothing/sizing information
• Budgets
• Thanksgiving meal plans
• Christmas meal plans
• Christmas cards/addresses
• Family photos
• Other holiday decisions

Keep a Running Gift-Idea List on Your Phone Year-Round

Whenever you:

• hear someone mention something they want
• see something in a little shop
• stumble across a great gift
• think of something perfect for someone

Write it down.

Then when the holidays come, you already have ideas instead of suddenly trying to figure out what everyone wants.

Track Every Gift You Purchase in Your Centralized Location

Record:

• What you bought
• Who it’s for
• How much you spent

This helps you:

• remember what you’ve already purchased
• see how much you’ve spent per child/person
• keep spending reasonably balanced
• avoid accidentally buying too much

Put Every Holiday Commitment on One Master Calendar

Include:

• School or co-op programs
• Office parties
• Church events
• Family gatherings
• Extended-family Christmases
• Any other commitments

Then add the work required before those events.

Schedule when you’re going to:

• Decorate
• Shop
• Bake
• Prep meals
• Handle seasonal household tasks
• Handle seasonal yard tasks

Make sure each task is broken down into what you actually need to do to accomplish that task. For example, prepping Christmas dinner doesn’t just require cooking the food, but also planning the meal, shopping for groceries, etc.

What Worked Well Last Christmas and What Didn’t

Look back at the previous year and identify:

• Things you loved
• Things that went smoothly
• Things that were stressful
• Moments where tension was created
• Situations that put a damper on the holiday season

You can look back through social media and pictures in your phone if you have any. Or if you keep a journal, or however else you can think back on what were wins from last year and what were losses so you can use that to decide what you’ll say yes to this year.

Question to ask yourself: What am I currently trying to remember that needs to be written down, scheduled, or tracked?

4. Reset Your Holiday Plan

Before the season starts filling up, take some time to decide what you actually want the next couple of months to look like.

The goal is to make as many decisions as possible before you’re tired, busy, behind, and trying to figure everything out at once.

• Aim to be mostly ready for Christmas by Thanksgiving.
  • Move as much practical work as possible into October and November so December can feel more restful.
• Choose one area to get ahead on first.
  • Gifts
  • Meals
  • Home prep
  • Your to-do list
  • Start with whichever one would relieve the most pressure later.
• Make as many pre-decisions as possible. Decide ahead of time:
  • Thanksgiving food
  • Christmas meals
  • Who you’re buying for
  • Gift budgets
  • Whether you’re making any homemade gifts
  • Whether you’re doing Christmas cards
  • Whether you’re doing family photos
  • Which traditions you’re keeping
  • Other seasonal logistics
• Plan holiday meals ahead of time.
  • Decide what meals you’re serving.
  • Decide what dishes you’ll bring to gatherings.
  • Include school events, fundraisers, class parties, church events, etc.
• Plan traditions before the season gets busy.
  • Decide what you genuinely want to do instead of seeing ideas throughout December and trying to squeeze everything in.

Question to ask yourself: What can I decide now that will save me the most stress later?

5. Make Room for the Christmas You Actually Want

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is that I don’t actually want to do less Christmas.

I want to do more of the Christmas I love.

For me, so much of what I love about Christmas is the nostalgia of it.

I want the house to smell like something is baking. I want a table with Christmas cookies and little treats sitting out for people to grab. I want Christmas music playing in the kitchen. I want evenings when it gets dark early and we turn on the tree lights and everybody snuggles in.

I want long Christmas letters. Not just a card with our names printed underneath a picture, but an actual letter telling people what happened in our family this year.

I want my kids to remember certain foods that always appeared at Christmas. Certain songs. Certain movies. Certain books. The same ornaments coming out of the boxes every year. Handwritten gift tags. Baking something we’ve made year after year. A house that feels warm and cozy and full of anticipation.

I’ve realized that if I want room for those things, I have to stop filling December with so much noise that doesn’t actually matter.

There are some things I’m deliberately not doing this year, and they’re making room for the things I actually want to do.

I’m Not Celebrating My Son’s Birthday on His Actual Birthday

This year, we went a little rogue and celebrated his three-quarter birthday in September instead, and it was honestly amazing. His birthday falls right in the middle of an already packed holiday season, and moving it gave his birthday room to actually be his birthday.

We had:

• Beautiful weather
• More daylight
• Outdoor options
• More places and activities available to us
• Less chance of everyone being sick
• Less competition with holiday parties and family obligations
• Less pressure on our calendar
• Less holiday spending happening at the exact same time
• More energy to actually plan something special
• A child who wasn’t being handed birthday presents right alongside Christmas presents

It made me realize that sometimes preserving a tradition exactly as we’ve always done it isn’t actually serving the reason the tradition exists.

We’re Taking a Temporary Break From Some of Our Weekly Organized Activities

Even if an activity technically continues through the holidays, that doesn’t mean our family has to. There are some seasons when I love having things on the calendar every week. But Christmas already comes with church events, family gatherings, special outings, errands, baking, shopping, and all the little things that aren’t normally part of our week.

Temporarily removing a few recurring commitments gives us some breathing room. That empty evening can become the night we do one of our favorite family traditions.

Our Meals Become Extremely Basic

This is not the season when I decide I’m going to suddenly become more ambitious with weeknight dinners. Around the holidays, I lean heavily on the meals from my 15-Minute Meal Plan, or I pull something I’ve already prepared from my Freezer Meal Plan.

I’d much rather spend an hour making Christmas cookies with my kids than spend that same hour making an elaborate Tuesday-night dinner. The everyday meals become simpler so I can put that energy somewhere more meaningful.

I Don’t Decorate

Ok, hear me out. It’s not that I completely don’t decorate. We just do a tree and some twinkly lights around the house. But we don’t do any other decorating. I finally let that go a couple years ago. It was honestly just more annoying to me than worth it. I didn’t like all the extra clutter, and having to decorate and pack certain year-round decor away and then take everything down. Then the kids were touching everything and getting into everything. The tree is enough. Also, we have a couple of those little singing stuffies, books and Christmas toys for the children, and that’s as far as I go when it comes to decorating.

Here’s What I Am Making Room For

I want more of those little things that create the feeling of Christmas in our home.

Things like:

• A big assortment of Christmas cookies and treats that we make slowly throughout the season and freeze until I need to bake them.
• Keeping a plate or cake stand of my favorite homemade treats out on the table during holiday events.
• Writing actual, long Christmas letters to people we love recapping our year. My grandparents have always done this and I just think it’s so nostalgic and since I’m not on social media much anymore, I’d love it if more people did this so I can have the highlights of their year! P.S. This is a big dream of mine to do this year, but I’m not actually sure I’ll get to it.
• I LOVE wrapping presents, but last year my wrapping was truly shameful. That’s a joke. If wrapping isn’t your thing, there’s no shame in that. But for me, I just LOVE wrapping beautiful presents and being intentional about the paper I’m using and making them just look beautiful. But last year I was so wiped from everything else that, I kid you not, I took the paper and just recklessly folded it around the presents with zero intentionality.
• Homemade gifts. I actually started this back up last year. I used to do this pre-children, I’d make little homemade vanilla extracts and things, but since having children I’ve since fallen out of the habit. But last year we made cute little jars of hot chocolate and it was SO fun and such a joy to do with the kids. It was also so nice that the children could experience making something for someone else and giving it to them.
• Playing the same Christmas albums every year so the music itself becomes nostalgic. We play the same Christmas CDs/playlists every year. Mostly the classics like Bing Crosby and the oldies-style Christmas songs. As the season progresses and we get a little fatigued from the Christmas music, I subtly switch it to Christmas instrumental.
• Reading the same Christmas books with the kids every December. I have a bin that is filled with Christmas books and I always switch out our books on the kids bookshelf with all the Christmas ones. A tradition is that they get a new Christmas book every year, and it’s always such fun. All these books have now become the backdrop of the season.
• Having certain meals and breakfasts that only happen at Christmastime. I LOVE making cinnamon rolls homemade and having those for Christmas morning so we will do those this year. I also would love to do a bake-and-take this year. I like to bake something and give it to neighbors and friends as a treat.

That’s what nostalgia is all about. The same cookie recipes. The same songs. The same ornaments. The same stories. The same smell coming from the oven. The same fun things your family does every December.

In order to do all of this, we have to say no to certain things.

Question to ask yourself: What could I stop doing this Christmas so I have more room for the things I actually want my family to remember?