The Official Holiday Grand Plan started on August 31.  In order to accommodate the Advent season I have started earlier, and I hope to have everything in order and ready for a calm and spiritual Advent season.

This week the I am focusing on the Dinning Room and the Children’s rooms.  My dinning room is very straight forward so there isn’t a ton of cleaning there.  Normally I would have done the children’s clothing at the middle of October, but this has slipped a month.  This is a good time to go through the children’s toys and toss/donate anything that isn’t played with.  

Weeks before follow up: The past two months have thrown me completely off task, life happens.  This is almost a restart so I have to take a little time to evaluate where I am this week.

Week Twelve: Cleaning:  The Dinning Room  page at the original Holiday Grand Plan is very helpful.
Children’s rooms: the Grand Plan cleaning page is a good place to start.  The main goal this week is to get all the summer clothing/too small/torn, stained and otherwise clothing out of the children’s drawers.  I am rather ruthless in this.  I developed a checklist for the children’s clothing that I use to “prune back” to and by following it I save myself a great deal of work in laundry and clothing maintenance.  I also want to go through the children’s toys.  As they grow they do out-grow certain things, some thing break, others aren’t played with.  By pruning the toys not only do I make room for the Christmas gifts that will soon be coming, but I create a great deal of sanity in my life.

Preparing for the Holidays: This week I am looking for some new holiday books.  We will pull the decorations up from the basement and double check what is working, broken, missing etc.   The goal is to have holiday gifts done by the first week in December. 

Planning:  The Offical Grand Planhas recommendations for this week.  My list is a little different since we started a couple weeks earlier.  The USPS had a Holiday Planner for mailing gifts.  Check it out.  If you are mailing gifts over-seas these need to be going out right now.  (USPS suggests last week for gifts for overseas troops).  We are finalising our Thanksgiving plans.

Gifts: I have fabric for the girls Santa Jammas  I need to make a trip to get some fabric for the boys. 
Cards:  Still working on my cross stitch cards.  I need to double check my mail list and order stamps.
Parties: No planning for parties this week.
Menus: No Holiday menu planning this week.
Decorating: Taking down the Halloween decorations and checking the lights and decorations.
Baking: The stores are starting to offer holiday baking items, it is a great time to stock-up.  This week we need to purchase any needed containers for freezing and gift giving. 
Devotionals: We got our Advent candles from our Little Flowers group.
Traditions: Checking the needed items for our wreath and Advent decorations..