Welcome to Cleaning Week!

Once again, we don’t have a specific to do list here, so we won’t be emailing every day. But the goal with cleaning week is to cover the following things:

• Declutter to make room for incoming presents
• Deep clean so you don’t have to worry about it for parties
• Get your house ready to decorate for the holidays.

We want our homes to be peaceful and friendly and ready for the holidays and all of the joy that they bring. Do your best to prepare now, so you don’t have to worry about it during the holidays!

If you’re stressed about being overwhelmed with new toys after Christmas, box up a few toys now. If you’re wondering where you’re going to put the new clothes that you know your baby will get, go through the old clothes and put together a box to gift to a pregnant mother that you know.

If you just know that someone is going to notice that your baseboards haven’t been cleaned in…well…awhile, clean them now. If you’re worried about the glass on the front door looking super grimy, wipe it down. 

We’ll be in the Facebook group with encouragement if anyone needs it. Good luck cleaning!

PJ and Brett

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – Christmas Week!

This is what most of our planning has led up to, and it’s finally here. By now, you should have your menu ready, gifts wrapped, house prepared, baking done, stockings hung, and stress gone. 

Our family doesn’t do much for Christmas week. What we focus on is spending quality time together, unplugging from electronics as much as possible, and focusing on the reason for the season. 

We do our best to do most of the Christmas cooking the day before, so we can have a lazy day and do nothing on Christmas. The kids wake up, sort the presents by person, make our traditional cinnamon rolls (store bought, because we attempt to do as little as possible), wake Mom and Dad up when breakfast is ready, and then open gifts in our pajamas. We go around the room, youngest to oldest, opening one at a time. Once the gifts are all open, we spend the day enjoying our Christmas gifts – putting together one of the puzzles we got, reading our new books, watching a new movie, enjoying the day together. 

However your family celebrates Christmas, we want it to be as stress free as possible. 

Here’s a few tips from our large family to have the most stress free Christmas day possible:

• Make as much food as possible the day before, so you just have to reheat it.
• If you don’t care about fancy dishes, just use plastic dishware. Less to clean up!
• Have trash bags ready for gift opening. After each round, all the trash goes into the bags.
• We sort each person’s presents into their laundry basket the night before or that morning. As presents are unwrapped, they go right back into your laundry basket. It contains each person’s items to their own basket, and makes cleanup easier. Plus, it ensures each kid does their laundry before Christmas. 😉 
• Have relaxing music going in the background. 
• Burn a nicely scented holiday candle. 
• Slow the gift opening process as much as possible. Unless you have somewhere you need to be, take the time to thoroughly exclaim over each new present, allow the gift giver to see the pleasure it brings, and allow the proud recipient to show it off to everyone else in the room. 
• Use the timer mode on your phone or camera to capture a few pictures of yourself enjoying the holidays with your loved ones, or ask someone else to take pictures of you. Even if you’re self conscious about the way you look in pictures, your family won’t care. They just want to see you in the memories. 

Don’t forget to focus on what Christmas means to you.  Don’t let the day go by in a rush without focusing on enjoying it. 

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Facebook group and we’ll do our best to answer them. 

Merry Christmas! We’ll see you next week for the last week of our course!

PJ and Brett

Welcome to the end of this year, and the beginning of a new year!

During the last few days of each year, we like to prepare for the new year by cleaning up from Christmas, cleaning the house, putting away the decorations, and such.

We also like to take time this week to reflect on the past year, and look on the year ahead. Make a list of things you were thankful for over the past year (looking at the calendar may jog your memory), look at last year’s goals and think about how you accomplished them, and make a list of goals for the coming year.

You can also write a letter to your future self that is designed to be read a year from now. There are websites like FutureMe.org, which will email you on the date you set. Brett likes to write a letter to herself each New Year’s Eve and send it to herself on New Year’s Day the next year. It’s a fun way to reflect on how things have changed in a year.

Prepare for any New Year’s Eve traditions you have. Our family eats junk food like pizza rolls, pizza bites, pigs in a blanket, wings, and such from the frozen food section, and bangs pots and pans together outside at midnight, singing “Happy New Year” to the tune of the Happy Birthday song. So we’ll go shopping for our food a few days before (since the cases tend to all be empty on New Year’s Eve) and make sure our pots and pans are all clean before midnight.

We would love to hear what your New Year traditions are. Do you make lists? Scream like a banshee at midnight? Watch the ball drop on TV? Drop by the Facebook Group and let us know.

We hope that this Holiday Course was valuable for you, and helped you to reduce your stress levels! If you have any feedback for us, or any ideas for how we can improve it next year, please let us know by emailing us at soap@goatmilkstuff.com. We would love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope that you have a wonderful New Year!

Signing off for the last time,
PJ and Brett

Good morning, and welcome to Week Two – Menu Week!

This week we will be preparing all of our menus for our holidays and parties, finding the recipes we’re going to use, and preparing shopping lists. 

This prep work will make things easier throughout the holidays to get everything you need to make your holiday food as easy as possible. 

Week Two Activities:

• Make menu for thanksgiving
• Make menu for Christmas
• Make menu for New Year’s 
• Make menu for any parties
• Write list of all food related activities/traditions/gifts
  • Decorating cookies
  • Drinking apple cider
  • Gingerbread houses
  • Making marshmallows
• Find recipes, put in binder
• Make Thanksgiving Shopping List
• Make Parties/Traditions Shopping List
• Make Christmas Shopping List 
• Make New Year’s Shopping List

Week Two Templates

We’re finishing up Week One today, and it should be relatively easy compared to some of the other days.

First, we’re going to look at what we’re doing to give back during this holiday season. For some, it’s volunteering. For others, it’s donating their time or money. And for some, all they can do is visit a retirement home and bring smiles to the faces of the folks who live there. No matter what you have the time, energy, or money to do, the holiday season is a wonderful time to give back to others, and if you have children, to show them a little more of the world we live in. 

Our family likes to send Operation Christmas Child boxes. These are shoeboxes filled with personal hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and more, that go to children in third world countries. You have to put them together early, because they deliver them to the children on Christmas morning and must make it halfway around the world by then. One of our new favorite things is that they’ve introduced a tracking feature, and you can find out where your shoebox was delivered.

No matter how you choose to help others in this holiday season, we encourage you to give something of yourself. So pull out your list for Charitable Giving and take a few moments to jot down what you would like to do, when you’re going to do it, and what supplies you will need.

If you’re going to bring hot chocolate to a neighbor, you’ll need a date to go over, hot chocolate, a few mugs, and maybe some marshmallows.

If you’re going to sing Christmas Carols at a retirement home,  you may need nothing other than your phone to pull up lyrics and a song to sing along with. 

If you’d like to do the Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, you’ll need quite a list of supplies (which you can find on their website). 

Whatever you choose, you can know that it will make a difference in this world and put a smile on someone’s face, and that’s all that matters. The holiday season is one of joy and happiness, and there’s nothing better than sharing our joy with others.

The last list we’re going to fill out this week is the Holiday Activities list.

For some, this will seem very similar to the Important Traditions list, but it’s slightly different. Our family does one thing every day, starting December 1st, through Christmas. These things include making gingerbread houses, painting Christmas ornaments, watching a favorite Christmas movie, decorating the tree, and more. Each of these items will go on this list, with a date if we’ll be doing it on a specific date, and we’ll cross them off as we complete them.

You can replace this list with another, if you’d like, or disregard it entirely, but it’s an important list for us, so we included it here.

Our last task for the day is to pull out our calendars (whether they are paper or electronic) and put in all of the important dates that we’ve filled in on our lists this week. These can be tasks big and small, whatever you want or need to do on a certain date throughout the holidays.

Some of the things that you might put on your calendar:

• • 25 activity events
  • Day to purchase tree
  • Day to decorate tree
  • Any parties
  • Shoe box packing party
  • Travel plans
  • Day of family photo
  • Days to visit people
  • Christmas at Grandma’s
  • Thanksgiving at Memaw’s

Once your calendar is updated, you did it! You survived Planning Week. 

Don’t forget to join us in the private Facebook group and share your Master Binder with us. We’d love to see how you’re doing and help encourage you as we move on.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week for Menu Week! 

PJ and Brett