While the holiday season should be about gratitude, peace, and time with family and friends, sometimes it can get the best of us. Deal shopping, endless marketing, countless holiday parties, and rushed holiday travel  can knock us off our feet. But with a few simple steps this holiday season you can take back the reigns.

Simplify your Holiday Season and Reduce Stress with these Minimalist Tips:

Get Organized

1. Create a holiday budget: List who you’ll be buying gifts for and how much you can afford to spend. This way you won’t go shopping clueless. Do some research to find out how much your potential gifts will cost. Make cuts where need be.

2. Set up a holiday wrapping center: Choose a part of the house to wrap presents in so that the entire house isn’t disheveled throughout December. If you’re sending holiday cards, write your cards in the same room.

Gift Giving

3. Cut back on kid gifts: Give the kids one meaningful, thoughtful gift rather than five smaller less important gifts.

4. Draw names for family gifts: If you have a couple of siblings, the costs can add up in no time. Consider drawing names from a hat for holiday gifts. The same is true for your office. Why not buy one gift that you think your office mate will actually like rather than a few less thoughtful gifts?

5. Give homemade gifts: I’ve gotten some of the most adorable homemade gifts over the years and they’re the ones I remember the most. Last year my friend gave me homemade pimento cheese in a mason jar–such a cute idea. Make the holidays your own with a signature homemade gift.

6. Host a cookie decorating party: My group of friends have a holiday cookie decorating party instead of exchanging gifts. Everyone makes a batch of sugar cookies and we all decorate them together. It’s a great reason to get together, sip on some vino, and enjoy each other’s company. And you get to take home some sugar cookie loot.

Cut Back

7. Create a paperless holiday card: It’s simpler than paper cards and so much more environmentally friendly.

8. Reuse gift wrap: Be careful opening presents so that you can reuse the wrap. Save any holiday gift bags that you receive. An entire portion of my closet is devoted to reused wrapping paper so I never have to kill a tree in the name of presentation.

9. Learn to say no: If you’re invited to a slew of holiday parties, don’t feel bad for saying no. Wouldn’t you rather enjoy a few of them than feel overwhelmed and bogged down having to attend too many? It’s okay to say no once in a while–your time is valuable.

10. Avoid travel: See family and friends during less hectic parts of the year. My husband and I stayed home for Christmas last year and I hate to admit it was one of the more relaxing holidays we’ve had. At the very least, if you’re married, simplify your holiday but not visiting both sets of parents.

11. Host a potluck: Instead of an over-the-top holiday party, have your friends over for a potluck. That way you don’t have to cook an entire meal because each guest will be playing a part.

Related on EcoSalon:
Get Your Holiday Gifts with EcoSalon’s The Box
This Holiday Season Try Something Lacy
Your Green Holiday Challenge: Shop Sustainably in Your Hood

Image: YO$HIMI

The post 11 Ways to Simplify This Holiday Season (P.S. You’ll Also Drastically Reduce Stress) appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I hate Christmas. If you like Christmas in the least, steer clear, or I may just ruin it for you…on every level possible.

Blame this on the holiday’s predictability, its waste, its hypocritical platform where we give to receive some forced satisfaction that somebody cares about us, throw in a sad Salvation Army bell ringer (that most people pass without even throwing a quarter to), and you’ve got a feel for why I can’t help but carry this loathing.

It reminds me of a popular article from EcoSalon about breast cancer awareness and why it’s not enough to donate money – no, we need to buy toxic pink plastic junk to support the cause.

We associate “giving” with simply getting more.

Yesterday over IM, my husband pinged me to ask if had I gotten myself what I wanted yet for Christmas.

“For real, I’m serious, I don’t want anything.”

“Jeez. Thanks for ruining another Christmas for me,” he shot back.

When I called him and told him I wasn’t into ruining anything and that I wanted to use my “gift money” for home improvements, he sighed. We’ve been married 15 years, and he should know me by now.

Gifts? How about saving up for a trip to Hawaii in February? How about fixing the weakening front steps so nobody sues us when they fall into the transom window-well by the front door?

I have gone through Christmases where I needed the gifting, when we were young and poor and lived off a credit card for food just before payday, where we kept the house really cold unless guests were coming over so as to save on heating costs, where we shopped at the Salvation Army to get decorations for a meager potted tree.

From the vantage point of our life now, I can laugh at these things, but at one point in my not-so-long-ago adult life, I was flat broke. Yet that lack of physical wealth didn’t hamper my spiritual love for family; in fact, it just brought us closer together. We used our hands and made things, we baked more, we played guitar and sang more, we went on hikes.

But today? As you read this, I am probably at the mall buying something for my 11-year-old daughter; if she doesn’t get what’s on her wishlist, she’ll be “really mad,” according to the helpful key at the bottom of her wish list. I wonder if this isn’t all my fault, that I’ve not expressed to my family in a clear manner that the holidays are a good time to start a travel fund instead of what we’ve become used to doing.

This morning on Facebook, I looked at what was going on in my friends’ lives and loved discovering that my friend in St. Louis was in the kitchen making Christmas cookies at “top speeds,” my friend Meghan from New York City was on the road, no doubt promoting her sustainable clothing line Afia, and still another friend was getting ready for a cross-country drive to another friend’s house she hadn’t seen in five years.

“This will be my best Christmas present ever,” she wrote.

I bet it will.

If we take away the material and replace it with the meaningful – which just means we focus on what our gut is already telling us to do – we might all be doing some thing a lot different this holiday season. And I suspect it wouldn’t involve the mall.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: photo_gratis

The post Between The Lines: Christmas Is the Last Thing I Want for Christmas appeared first on EcoSalon.