Years and years ago, a fantastic woman named Cynthia Townley Ewer created a website called OrganizedChristmas.com and listed a handful of different house and holiday prep plans on it. I discovered her website in 2004 as I was heading into my first Christmas as a stay-at-home mom. I was OBSESSED with her website and followed it every year until she shut it down. Wisely, I printed off all the pages she had created and offered for free on her site, so I still have my Houseworks Holiday Planner binder to reference each year.

I discovered a new website carrying on her work a few years ago: Magical Holiday Home. I’m terrible about posting there, but I do check in from time to time and enjoy reading through the posts that others leave about their efforts to follow the House & Holiday Plan each year.

The House & Holiday Plan is an eighteen week long preparation plan that focuses on a different area of the house each week for deep cleaning and various aspects of holiday planning so that you arrive at Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Year’s relatively sane and calmly prepared. It starts (generally) on the Sunday before the Labor Day weekend, which was yesterday, so here we are! It’s HHP time!

I have never followed the plan all the way through to the end. Never, in over twenty years. But that doesn’t stop me from starting up with it every single year! I enjoy whatever work I’m able to get done with its help and I love me any excuse to start working on holiday things as early as possible.

In the interest of trying to motivate me to achieve that impossible dream of following this plan through to the absolute end, I’m going to blog about it. Public accountability works well for me.

Week #1 is Planning & Paperwork Week.

The cleaning focus is the home office, and the holiday prep focus is setting up for this year’s HHP.

Week #1 Cleaning Checklist: Office

• Declutter and clean the home office and any paper handling areas.
• Set up (or refresh) your household filing system.

Week #1 Holiday Prep Checklist:

• Set up your Christmas binder.
  • My husband used ChatGPT to create the little banner at the top of this post, and now there’s a new planner cover to match:

• Complete the Holiday Values Worksheet to figure out what you’d like to focus on during this year’s holiday season. (Click here for the PDF)
  Note: Cynthia Townley Ewer wrote this and I completely copied it for myself.

• Create a Christmas planning activity center.
  • I’m planning to use my dining room table this year. We don’t use the dining room a whole lot, so I figure I might as well use the empty space for this festive fun! I do worry because it’s one of the first rooms you see when you walk into my house, but anyone who would bother visiting me already knows I’m a Christmas junkie, so it’ll be fine.
  • I have a rolling cart specifically earmarked for Christmas stuff, so it’s been moved into the dining room to live up to its intended purposes.
  • I’m thinking of setting up a second sewing machine and/or crafting area on the dining room table so that I can pop in and work on things for a few minutes at a time when I’m making dinner. There’s often minutes of waiting involved when cooking and I’ve gotten into the nasty habit of scrolling on my phone during that time. It’d be WAY BETTER if I got two minutes of stitching here and twelve minutes of stitching in there. I can’t hear the oven timer at all from the craft room and I often forget to set an actual timer on my phone to take to the craft room, so another crafty location near the kitchen would be awesome. And it’s just fun!
    • With that in mind, what project(s) do I want to earmark for the dining room table? Can’t be cutting heavy because I do not want to set up a cutting station in the dining room.
• Establish a holiday budget.
• Begin a Master Gift List.
  • I really like the Christmas Gift List app made by engApps. I’ve been using it for years.

Even though the HHP plans begins on a Sunday, I like to run mine from Monday through Sunday so I can use the weekend to finish up the week’s tasks. It’s my hope to check in each Monday with my HHP progress! Feel free to join in if it sounds like a good idea to you! I’d love to have more Christmas-obsessed buddies in my circle!