Holiday Preparations You Can Get Done Now

image via Crafting Tiger Etsy Shop

Here's a task that takes up lots of time during the holiday season. Christmas card preparations. How many times have you gotten started only to send out your cards a few days after Christmas, in mid-January or retitled as Valentine's Day Cards? I will confess that more often than I like I have mailed cards between Christmas and New Years.

I may not want to choose my card design yet, but I can get ready to do my cards. Two things I'm ready to work on that will make life much easier come the holidays are compiling and updating my address list and starting a rough draft of our simple little family letter. I can also go ahead and buy stamps now to avoid those horrible holiday post office lines.

Last year I created an Excel spreadsheet with addresses that I would need for Christmas cards and at some point wedding invitations. I keep a word doc where I keep a very rough list of addresses that have changed over year which I use as a quick access list and later to update my spreadsheet once or twice a year. It will only take a few minutes to add to and update my list each year now that I have a master list to work from.

I've started thinking this week that it's a good time to whip up a rough draft of our brief family letter we include with the personal messages I write in cards. Fingers crossed we don't have any more big events coming up this year. I've had enough already, haahaa (but not haahaa.) I can start compiling a few photos now, to create our little family photo collage and even have it all ready to print once it gets closer to the holidays. No need to wait, especially since we won't have any more photos taken all together until after Christmas.

It's projects like these that when done early seem easy and quick that can later become a big headache once you're tired, worn out and under the gun to get ready for the holidays. I frequently forget that the more tired and busy I am the slower I get things done, the more jumbled and unfocused my brain is and the more easily frustrated I get. Here's hoping we can all avoid a lot of that this holiday season. Any projects you are working on early this year?

You can find this pretty holiday card in the Etsy shop Crafting Tiger. The shop is full of charming, witty and sometimes geeky or irreverent greetings for all occasions.