Welcome to the 2024 Chic for the Holidays series. The winter holidays are just around the corner, and are you hoping for your most organized and peaceful year yet?
You’re going to love what I have planned to guide you through:
- Budgeting and activity planning for the holidays
- Setting your intentions and boundaries to ensure personal care and rest is prioritized
- Aligning your goals with expectations for gift shopping while avoiding the consumerism chaos
- …and more!
I was inspired to do this series after having a super successful 2023 holiday season nutrition wise because of my nutrition program, SheTrition. I realized that the coaching sessions with Shantell Taylor leading up to the holidays really helped me create a solid game plan that kept me on track with my progress. I learned to...
- Set clear goals on what meals I was willing to indulge in
- Make a realistic plan for my nutrition despite road tripping across states
- Listen to my body for hunger and fullness cues, avoiding overeating
- Set boundaries to avoid stressing and feeling guilt around holiday splurges
- Become overall aware of my decisions regardless of my schedule or social setting
I've bundled some of these lessons and effective tactics from last year's holiday season into a guide for you this year as we tackle mindset, emotions, and money for the 2024 holidays!!! It's gonna be fun, I promise!
And everything that I’m sharing in this content series will be updated on this blog post. It’ll be your one-stop-shop to all the tips and other resources I’ll be sharing over the next month.
Setting Intentions
This is your friendly reminder that if you want to have an emotionally regulated Thanksgiving and Christmas, you should start your game plan now. That includes tackling emotional spending, recognizing when your social battery is depleted, being intentional about self care, and setting boundaries.
Ask yourself…
- What do you want to experience? (Emotions, quality time, events, trips, etc.)
- How do you want to fill your days? (Type of activities)
- What do you want your budget to look like? (Savings or tempered spending within budget)
Getting clear on what you want life to look like after January 1st can help you make the right decisions now to help you navigate the chaos.
Set aside time today to write down a few intentions (or goals) for the holiday season that will make it the best one yet! This first step is crucial in making your goals a reality.
Build a Holiday Reflection Routine
This step focuses on building up a daily routine specifically catered to your holiday season. Setting intentions are great, but putting those intentions into practice causes your goals to become a reality.
Making our goals, wishes, and thoughts can most easily be done through reflection, affirmation repetition, and visualization. What’s the best way to facilitate these? Through a regular journaling practice.
Starting early will help cement the new routine as a fixture in your daily tasks in time for the holidays when schedules become busy and unpredictable. This will be an established constant in your schedule already.
As you start to think about your holiday savings plans, begin gift shopping, and create event plans—use my new daily holiday journal and mood tracker. Reflection is one of the best tools we have for personal growth. In order to have a more enjoyable and peaceful holiday season, this is a crucial step!
The journal focuses mainly on daily spending and your mood. So keep that in mind when thinking about how these things affect your holidays each year.
Download your copy at the link below and start to use it daily in your holiday prep and into the holiday season.
Get your journal & mood tracker here!
Join the 5-Day Holiday Prep Challenge
Ready to plan a stress-free holiday season? Join the Chic for the Holidays 5-Day Challenge, happening October 8-12! We'll cover everything from setting goals and organizing your schedule to creating a budget and tackling Black Friday with ease. Don’t miss out on these golden nuggets—sign up now and take control of your holidays! ✨
Emotionally Prepare for the Holidays through Budgeting
Ready for an emotionally regulated Christmas season?
I found myself in a much better mood and in control of my busy holiday season when I got intentional about my budget ahead of time and made a plan to execute.
If you’ve been on my email list for a while, you might recall my horror story of how I had to drive back to my Seattle apartment in an ice storm 3 days before Christmas and sit out the holiday with my family. I was crushed by this realization while my husband and I got settled back into our place, suitcases in tow, snow on our boots. But in the back of my mind, I was somewhat relieved because I hadn’t finished gift shopping and my packing for the trip was quite haphazard.
I was so focused on the wrong things that I couldn’t enjoy the trip back to the Midwest. All for the emotional rollercoaster to be for nothing when our flights were cancelled.
I vowed to never take time with our larger family for granted and to always put a plan in place for the logistics side of the holidays so that I could fully enjoy it.
One of the areas I was lacking was in my gift shopping budget, hence the last minute plans to shop once our flight landed. So the following year, I took a different approach:
- I made a list of everyone I needed to shop for, and put “nice to find something for” names at the bottom.
- I set a shopping budget for gifts and selected a hand full of stores I was going to purchase ALL my gifts from. My shopping was contained to one general mall area to limit the driving and time spent.
- I added a shopping Thursday to my calendar in early December to avoid Black Friday and Cyber Week shoppers and weekend shoppers. (This will be more like mid-December this year)
- If I couldn’t find a gift for everyone on my list, I placed an online order immediately to ensure enough time for shipping. This happened to be a very short list.
This might sound excessive, but taking all these methodical steps helped me enjoy my holidays a lot more, in November AND December. Plus, through reflection, I realized that gift giving was but a small part of my holiday experience. However, showing my family and friends that I was thinking of them and put consideration into purchase a gift was conveyed through my gifts. I don’t mind being a frugal shopper when I know the gifts aren’t the important part. The consideration for my loved ones is what counts.
Let’s say you also have to worry about cross country travel, events and parties, gift shopping, and travel needs. Those expenses add up and just stuffing them into your October budget for flights/costumes, November budget for travel needs/Thanksgiving food, and December budget for shopping won’t cut it.
It’s actually time to start a savings plan NOW! Try to find areas in your budget to tuck away and earn extra money for the increased expenses.
Think about this for the week…
- Will you work your holiday spending into your budget for each month? (this also implies Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc.)
- Do you need to start a savings plan for the holiday season now? How much will you set aside?
Taking the time to figure these things out will definitely help you in the long run and contribute to a more calm and emotionally regulated holiday season.
Holiday Gift Giving Prep
The gift giving component to the holidays can bring on a whole new set of problems if you don't have a plan. Between the budgeting strains, long list of recipients, and brands pushing their own agenda--it can get hectic, to say the least. But I'm happy to share that with an intentional plan (are we seeing a theme here?) it can be quite *enjoyable*!
Remember how we used to shop for gifts IRL? My family would organize outlets shopping trips that streamlined gift shopping every year. Yeah, at 8 years old, I only had a handful of people to shop for with a $100 budget, but we were on to something back then.
Get this...
Gift giving is not the crux of your relationships during the holidays. Yes, your loved ones and friends will appreciate the thought behind the gift, but most people will not spend enough mental time on it for you to labor on the process.
Brands have sales goals to meet, so you will be bombarded for Black Friday, Cyber Week, and more. Put a plan into place to combat these very effective marketing tactics to maintain your sanity, budget, and hair edges this season.
Here are just a few tips to get you started:
- Set social media and TV limits to limit the advertising you receive.
- Identify your favorite brands early on and commit to shopping events you'll indulge in and draw the line there. (no buyer's remorse this year!)
- Carve out a slice of your budget specifically for holiday gifts, splurging, AND spontaneous spending
Self discipline is key with money management, but planning for spontaneous spending is a part of that strategy, too. If you're in the mood to indulge, by all means, go ahead! But it's going to be more effective when you are prepared to do that.
Join the Chic for the Holidays 5-Day Challenge
That's it for this series! I hope it has jumpstarted a successful holiday season for you, whatever that looks like. Want a little more guided help through this process? Join my 2024 Chic for the Holidays 5-Day Challenge.
We'll cover everything from setting goals and organizing your schedule to creating a budget and tackling Black Friday with ease. Don’t miss out on these golden nuggets—sign up now and take control of your holidays! ✨
The live challenge will take place October 8-12, 2024, but you can still get access to the content after those dates to walk through the challenge at your own pace.
