Good gravy, there’s a lot to do before Thanksgiving! Having a bunch of guests and a major feast in your home isn’t small potatoes. So, how do you pull it off without feeling like a turkey? Watch this video for your Thanksgiving holiday survival guide.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdthanksgiving.)
Transcript:
Hi I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and online program. Today I have for you a Thanksgiving Survival Guide– a bunch of tips just to make Thanksgiving more successful for everybody who’s involved, especially you.
There are some organizing projects that you can do before Thanksgiving comes that will really help you on the big day. Organizing your pantry and your refrigerator are important to get ready for all of that extra food that’s going to be coming in and all the leftovers and everything.
Also, you want to get your guest arrangements made. If you have a guest room or a pullout sofa, make those arrangements, especially if you have multiple guests, you might decide who’s sleeping where, and get that all ready.
There may be some emergency quick cleanup that you need to do with the clutter around your house. And what some people do is stash things away. Sometimes that’s necessary and I really do understand that, there is a right and a wrong way to stash. Make sure you do that so that you can recover after the holiday and that clutter is all put away in the right place and nothing gets lost.
Let’s talk about the big meal. The biggest thing is just preparing and thinking through all of the stuff you’re going to need, because the grocery store is going to be closed that day. Have a standard menu and shopping list every year for Thanksgiving. Most families have the same dishes every year because they’re everybody’s favorites, take advantage of that. Keep that information in Evernote or in a Word document, and that way you’ve got a head start on your shopping list.
Shop early and not on Wednesday like everybody else is going to do, and even cook early if you can. For example, while you’re just watching TV a week before, you can bake the cornbread stuffing and put that in the freezer. You can make pie crusts or whatever you need to do ahead of time so that you’re not stuck doing it all the day before or the day of.
Then you want to think about during the meal itself, all the delegation that can take place if you plan ahead so that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Everybody knows, having a dishwasher is helpful and a dish drier, but there are a lot of little jobs you can delegate if you think about it like a trash monitor, to take the garbage out when it needs to be. Or the leftover coordinator, to make sure everyone’s got their containers and everybody’s got the leftovers they want to take home. Even having a kid do a hunter/gatherer kind of job where they go around looking for plates and forks and cans and glasses that need to be either washed or thrown away.
And then plan beyond the big feast. There are other meals through that whole weekend that you need to plan. Don’t forget to write that down in your shopping list stuff. You also have activities that need to be planned beyond those football games. Maybe a bunch of games, you could play a game tournament of some sort, go sightseeing, take walks. Think through it so everybody’s not sitting around twiddling their thumbs and looking at you bored.
All right, so when you’ve got the family all together you can be really efficient about a few things. So think about this – if you have a bunch of holiday decorations in your attic or in your garage and you need help getting those down and getting them put up, why not enlist the family members to help you get those taken down and put in place? That would be a lot of extra helping hands, that would be a really good idea. Also, if anyone has passed away unfortunately in this year and there are some inherited items that need to be decided upon – the best example would be a giant box of memorabilia or photos – if you’re all together at one place, get that stuff and sort it out when you’re with each other so you can enjoy the memories and you can also, you know, make those decisions together, and it’s just much easier.
And finally, if you have a Christmas drawing of names that you do, or if you haven’t really gotten on the same page about what’s going to happen for the holiday gifts, you can have that conversation or draw those names while you’re together. So be smart about that.
Now, you’re going to be going into Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving, so don’t go into that blindly without a plan. Make sure you’ve got your gift list all written out and you know how much you want to spend and kind of what you’re looking for before you go out into the wilderness of Black Friday and get caught with all of the glitter of all of the sales going on. And then think about even things like shipping deadlines for those gifts and really think through your holiday gifting as Thanksgiving’s going on so that you go into it the right way and you really have a great system in place.
So we can help you with this in our on-line program if you need any assistance. We help people seven days a week, all over the world, at https://www.clutterdiet.com for about the price of a pizza. So come check us out there. And remember, this holiday is all about gratitude, and that is one of the most important values to me personally. And that is why I say at the end of every video, may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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