When you have a family with children at home, the holidays can be both an exciting and an overwhelming time. While there might be things that you want to do with your kids to help celebrate the season and give everyone a break from their normal routines, you also need to be sure that you’re not overscheduling everyone and making things more stressful than holiday seasons already can be.
To help you in finding the right balance here, here are three tips for creating a holiday schedule for your family.
Get The Calendar Logistics Right
Arguably the best way to create a schedule for your family for any holiday, be it the summer break from school or the winter holidays, is to put everything on a calendar. This way, not only can you know what’s going on and keep track of which day it is and what you’ve all wanted to do on those days, but everyone can know what to expect on each day of their holiday.
As you get a calendar ready to print off, make sure you have a place to put the calendar that everyone in your home will see. And, when you’re figuring out what you’re going to be doing on which days or who you’re putting in charge of certain tasks, consider using a color coded system so that even those who can’t read yet or aren’t as organized can easily see what’s going on and what they’re responsible for.
Plan To Do Things With Your Family And In Groups
While holidays can be great times to reconnect with your family, they can also be fun occasions to get together with friends or other groups. So if you’re wanting to do both of these things over your holiday time, it can be helpful to plan all of this out ahead of time.
For particularly social families, planning something with a group each day or every other day could be a good idea. But make sure you make these plans ahead of time so that you’re not left scrambling to find people to get together with when they’ve already made plans themselves for their holiday.
Use This As A Time To Talk About Your Budget
The holidays are special times for many families, and special times often come with extra spending. So while you might want to make the holidays special with your family, you should also keep everyone’s expectations in check by talking openly about your budget for the approaching holiday. If things are tight or your family is trying to save for something big, make sure you speak with everyone about what type of things you can afford during this holiday and how that may affect your plans together.
If you want to have a schedule for the upcoming holidays that you’ll be celebrating as a family, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you put this schedule into place successfully.