Holiday Planning

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The Making of Holiday Events

by: Cyndi Seidler

What's your vision of this holiday season? Creating a memorable holiday is like orchestrating a major production. There are people, props, and agendas involved.

Appoint yourself as the producer and bring together the pieces to transform your vision into a reality.

Start a list of what activities would give you the most pleasure, and then decide what the main event(s) will be.

Are you going to be throwing a party? Having a tree-trimming party? Doing charity work? Going on a light-gazing tour? You might need to do meal planning, party planning, travel planning, and/or gift planning.

Break down your holiday event(s) into action tasks. Set priorities and schedules of the activities that need to be carried out.

It's a good idea to keep all your planning information in a notebook binder. Put all your lists and information in this to use each year. Keep meal plans, special activity plans, party plans, gift ideas, holiday card lists, and travel details in the binder.

Get others involved. Delegate some of the tasks to family or close friends. After all, you're the producer, and producers do their best when they have a team helping them with the production.

Another piece of the holiday production would probably include meal plans. Decide on the menus and stock up on food early. It's even a good idea to prepare any food you can in advance. Or, maybe you may want to let someone else cook for you and have your meal catered? If you have helpers, designate a "desert team" to do the holiday baking.

No holiday production list is without a separate gift list. Get creative with gift-giving. Make a list of gift ideas that you can create yourself (or buy at affordable costs).

Think of something memorable and personal, something useful, something consumable, something that grows, maybe some excursion experiences.

If you have some artistic abilities, make a drawing, put your song on a cassette tape, or write some prose and mount it. How about putting together some personal mementos, like an album of photo collections, or a memorable video?

Of course, if you have any gifts that need to be mailed, you must also be timely in shipping these out. With postal security, this is important in ensuring the gifts sent by mail arrive in time.
The same applies to getting holiday cards mailed out. Schedule this on your calendar so that they are received a week or two before the holiday.

Now, a good producer is only as good as they can stay within a budget. So, establish a budget and be realistic on it.

It's best to try and break down a budget for each activity. More too often, people resort to using credit cards for their spending needs. But try to adopt policy to do cash-spending. You won't have to look back "after the fact" that you're heavy in debt.

Decorating the home for the holidays is yet another part of the production that helps put people in the holiday spirit. You can even make a family event out of this.

By the time the holiday events arrive, you just might be nominated to win the Holiday Awards!

About the author:
"Organizer to the Stars" Cyndi Seidler is an author, syndicated columnist and professional organizer. She's a frequent media guest, and has been helping individuals create organized lifestyles since 1994. Her methods have helped prominent celebrities such as Sinbad, Eric Roberts, Karen Black, Tisha Campbell, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Larina Adamson, Bobbi Billard, Billy Sheehan, and Spencer Davis get a grip on their hectic lifestyles.

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