Holiday Decorating and Some Printables

Hi everyone, I hope you all have had a great week and weekend!  To my American friends, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  It was a busy week, here in my little world.  Between cold/flu season rearing it's ugly head, a Teddy Bear picnic requiring a homemade wagon for the parade, a Library field trip and so much more, my head has just been spinning.  Between all of this I've been tackling each room in the house, giving it a good once over before the holiday season really hits.  Next week is the big one here, on Saturday I can officially start decorating and playing Christmas music to my heart's content!

Because Travis was off this weekend, but not next, I decided to pull out the decorations so we could get started on decorating the outside, specifically the lights.  We won't be turning them on until the 1st, but we wanted them ready  to go.  So, I pulled out all the boxes and bins and then had to go through them all to find where I put what.  Oh dear!  While it was fun to go through everything, it was time consuming.  So time consuming that we never did get to hanging up the lights.  It just took too long to find the outside ones amid all the boxes.  I wasn't too impressed with how I put things away two years ago.  (last year we went out of town for Christmas, so we didn't decorate) After all that grief, I decided that I need to do a few things differently from now on.  Firstly, I need to organize our stuff better, as in, I think I need to group it into categories, like indoor and outdoor.  Maybe even take it a few steps further, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.  I also want something that I can look at as reference.... I want a Master List.  Since my packing list worked so well for our move, I decided to adapt it for the Holiday Planner, and I made an Indoor and Outdoor one.

 Indoor Decor List

Outdoor Decor List

They are pretty straight forward.  Each box is for a different storage container or box, and it keeps track of what is stored in it, where I'm storing the box/container itself (we have two spots where we store Christmas decorations) as well as a spot for priority.  That spot is more for when it comes time to store everything away until next year.  What I usually put up first will be the last things put away, so they are the first things that come out.

I know that master lists don't always work for everyone.  Many people prefer to just use a label on the box. Well I thought of that too!  

Decor Box Labels

These ones print two to a page, simple cut along the dotted line in the middle.  There's a spot for listing what's in the box, a little checklist area in case you want to mark off what category of items are in the box, and I left space for a picture of the content. 

I'm now really excited for Holidays to get here!  I've only got a couple of printables left to share with you later on this week, and then I'll show you how I put it all together.  As always, to grab your copy of the printables click the caption under the photo.  

I hope you all are having a great start to this final week of November.  Can you believe how fast this month went by?  Are you ready for the Holidays?  Anything left on your to do list?  Have you started decorating or shopping yet?

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