Ready, Set, Plunge: Thoughts on getting ready for Advent

This coming weekend, the weekend before Thanksgiving, feels like the last moments of normalcy before the inevitable plunge into holidays that always seems to leave me reeling in January. I’m looking into the next week and beyond and I see a trip for Thanksgiving, a book release, the beginning of Advent, a trip to Israel, Christmas and family visits, New Year’s Eve, and then January. I also see mounds of unfolded clothes and school work and dirty dishes that need attending. Beautiful, wonderful, messy things that are coming too hard and fast.

Here is my plan for preparing, paring down, and quieting myself to enjoy the plunge.

I am going to buy Christmas presents early. I might even wrap them by next weekend.

This is an unusually busy year for us, so I am not even going to try to make anything. My goal is to prevent last minute panics.

2. Next weekend after Thanksgiving, I am going to decorate.

Last year, for the first time, I experimented with mostly decorating only for Advent and saving Christmas stuff for right before Christmas. It was delightful. Decorating for Advent? It involves about 3 things, wasn’t hard, and felt satisfying. I loved the way our home reflected our anticipation, but I am going to make a few changes this year. My mom has given me beautiful Christmas dishes and it takes effort to get them down and clean and I love them so much that I’ve decided we’ll use them all of December. My plan is to put up a bare Christmas tree as a symbol of our wait and then decorate mid-December.