Organise ’08 – Christmas in July.

Before I get started on this post I need to ask something…. Why is it ‘Christmas in July’ and not ‘Christmas in June’???

I am not nuts – if you are a non-Aussie you may have been wondering about that, but we backwards southern hemisphere people have a silly custom of sometimes celebrating a ‘second Christmas’ in the middle of the year. It’s nice for us to celebrate Christmas at a time when it is actually cold and wintery here so all the songs and snowy Christmas scenes and heavy winter food actually make sense. I get the idea behind it… I just don’t understand why we do it in July and not June – I mean June 25th would be half Christmas and close to the Winter Solstice here… and just make more sense in general don’t you think??

Anyway…. I am not here to talk about Christmas in June or July, but the regular Christmas, in December. I just want to start thinking about Christmas in July on the off chance that I might be a tad more organised than usual come December!

Every year I promise myself I will not leave Christmas preparations to the last minute. Every year I make all these plans for making gifts for family and friends, for planning in advance, for not spending massive amounts of money on gifts no one really wants. I long to have the lead up to Christmas being a joyful, restful, exciting, stress-free time… but it never is. I am always scrambling around trying to come up with last minute gifts, trying to fit everything in before the big day actually arrives, but not this year. Oh no.. this year, 2008 the Year of Organisation at the Pickle Farm… this year will be different!

Inspired by the Planning Queen (I want to be her when I grow up) who has set herself a July goal of planning for Christmas and she is well on her way, having already blogged about present buying – I am totally going to copy her and at least start thinking about this now.

So what things do I need to think about, to plan in advance for, to make the end of year rush a little bit more manageable?

Traditions
What family traditions do we want to get involved with? How will we decorate? How will we celebrate?

Cards
Planning for and making our own Christmas cards in time to actually post them, as well as setting a time line for taking on custom design work for other people’s cards.

Presents
Presents for our kids. Presents for our family and other people we buy for.

Food
The best bit to plan.. what will we eat when!?!

For now I am just opening my mind to the possibility of being organised well before Christmas – that is a mean feat in and of itself I must tell you. I just have my ‘Christmas radar’ on in the back of my mind so if I am out and about and see something that would make the perfect present I know to grab it now and not wait. Or if I am browsing the net and see a really great craft activity that would be perfect for a gift or decoration I know to bookmark it now, start collecting the items we need now.

In the next few months I am going to bore you all silly by blogging more about this, because I determined that I will not leave everything (though I may leave some things) till the last minute this year. I wonder if I will be eating humble pie on this very blog come December!

(ps – I was looking for a nice Christmasy photo to break up the boring words in this post when the photo up the top caught my eye. This is Zoe on her very first Christmas Day. When I arrived at the nursery on Christmas morning I was greeted with this site – someone had knitted teeny tiny Christmas hats for all the babies. She’d only just come out of NICU and off c-pap and still needed O2 so it is not just the photo, she really does look a bit blueish. )