Welcome to one of our favorite weeks – Decorating Week!

This week we’ll put up the garlands, hang the advent calendars, carefully place our nativities where they go, and wrap lights around the railings. Blast the Christmas music, sing at the top of your lungs, and have fun!

If you have a fake tree, you can put it up this week – we tend to wait one more week to get and put up our real tree, because we’ve found we have better luck with it not drying out before Christmas if we wait a week. But we’ll get the ornaments ready to go.

If you have any Christmas traditions with your family, it is now December, so it’s time to start focusing on those.

We do our advent calendar with 25 activities for the family to do during the month of December. Activities range from watching a Christmas movie to drinking hot chocolate to putting up the tree to driving around to look at lights to painting our own ornaments for the year (a family favorite tradition!). But if you don’t have any traditions that need to be started now, then you can just focus on decorating your house for Christmas and enjoying the process.

In Week One, we asked you to ask your family what their most important holiday traditions where, what mattered to them. Refer to this list again as you decide what decorating needs to be done, and what you can let go of to reduce stress. Christmas should be about fun and family memories, not stressing out about making everything perfect. Don’t be afraid to put aside perfection to reach for fun and family memories. Your family’s Christmas will not be ruined if there aren’t lights on the outside of the house.

Remember – you don’t HAVE to decorate. If you don’t want to? Don’t bother. If your family wants to, they can pick up the slack and do it themselves. If it’s important to them and they’re too young to do in themselves, help them, but for the most part, if decorating is stressing you out, you don’t have to do it.

This holiday season should be full of joy and love. Don’t lose that by forcing yourself to be a perfectionist! We’ll be in the Facebook Group if you need someone to tell you that it’s okay to let things go. 🙂

Good luck,
PJ and Brett