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Stressed in holiday style
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Feeling frazzled already? You have 31 days to get your Christmas act together. Read on for more tips to make the season merry and bright and eliminate the possibility of a blue Christmas. |
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We're not being cute. We're bringing this fact to the attention of those people -- and you know who you are, because you go through this every year -- who say, "Christmas just sneaked up on me this year."
People, the days of sneaking are long gone. The holidays are tapping you firmly on the shoulder, and in another few days they're going to be slapping your face to get your attention. This is it. The time is now. It's 31 days and counting until Christmas Eve.
With that in mind -- and attentive to the fact that our attentions and emotions have been otherwise engaged this year in matters of life and death -- we offer suggestions to help you plan, mail, decorate and wrap so you'll arrive at the night before Christmas as calm as a silent night, and not the ragged ghost of Christmas past.
 [Times art: Don Morris] |
Making a plan
One way to destress the holidays is to gather the family and talk about what's going to happen in the next 31 days. All events you know about should be on a master calendar: parties, rehearsals, performances, religious services, school events. Anyone who is going to need three dozen cookies and a gift for a school party or sleepover should speak up now, not two hours before the event.Make some choices: Are you going to try to get to three parties and a tree-lighting on the same evening, or are you going to pick a couple of those events and skip the others?
If you're planning to travel this holiday season, you should have made your reservations by now. If you haven't, do so at once. Planes and motel rooms are likely to fill up quickly. Think about traveling at off-peak times, like Sunday mornings or Christmas Day itself.
"We're going to have to see what happened at Thanksgiving before we begin to think about what might happen for Christmas," said Jerry Cheskie, a spokesman for the American Automobile Association. This weekend might be an indicator of how willing the American public is to travel at Christmas. Cheskie expects to have a better forecast for Christmas travel the second week of December.
This is also the time for the Holiday Alpha Person -- in many households that's Mom -- to firmly declare: The holidays are not a spectator sport. Santa doesn't do it all alone; nor should you. Why do you think he has all those elves? One person should not be expected to perform solo the roles of decorator, gourmet cook, personal shopper, host, activities director and chauffeur. In other words, family members are expected to pitch in. This is the time to assign responsibilities.
Cards and mailing
Americans send 1.7-billion Christmas cards each year, and the average American household sends and receives 28 cards, Hallmark reports. Greeting cards are a $7.5-billion industry, and Christmas cards make up more than 60 percent of all seasonal cards sold. This year the postmaster general has urged Americans to send lots of cards. Return-address labels are considered mandatory this year.
The etiquette mavens may cringe at the notion of computer-generated mailing labels, but they're a lot faster than hand addressing, and they're easier for letter carriers to read. This year, look in the office-supply stores for labels with holiday designs, along with holiday-themed papers to print out your annual letter.
In what has to be the ultimate holiday time-saver, Hallmark will hand address and hand sign your cards for you, stamp and mail them. Select one of their paper cards online, at www.hallmark.com. (Click on "e-cards and cards" and then on "read about hallmark.com paper cards.") Choose a verse they provide, or write your own (and you can compose a different verse for every card, if you like). Upload your address list (you can even do it from a Palm organizer), and within a week your cards are on their way.
The hand signing and addressing are done by about 70 employees of a Hallmark subsidiary "who obviously have very good handwriting," spokeswoman Kathy Mishek said. "That's what they do all day, hand sign and address cards."
The service, started last year, is most popular with business customers, which is probably no surprise, but also with "a lot of moms, who have a 250-person card list" and are already on overload with kids and work. For bulk orders, typically from business clients, the addresses are printed rather than handwritten.
The cost for this, if you choose the "deluxe" service -- customized greeting, hand signing and addressing -- is 75 cents above the cost of the card, and that includes the 34-cent stamp, Mishek said. Cards start at $1.95. The cost is lower if the customer chooses fewer services: You may want Hallmark to send you the envelopes on which it has printed your return address and the addresses of the recipients so you can sign the cards and mail them yourself.
Mishek would not say how much Hallmark makes on this service, but did reveal that it is in their top five most profitable offerings. Outside holiday time, this is a popular service for invitations and announcements.
Or hire someone closer to home to address your cards. Kirby Wilson of Tampa is a calligrapher who addresses envelopes for both professional and personal Christmas card lists as well as weddings and charity events. (He also works for the U.S. Postal Service, so you know the ZIP codes will be correct.) He charges 75 cents to $1 per envelope, depending on whether he uses a simple style or an elaborate one. For 100 cards he needs a week or 10 days of lead time. Reach him at (813) 831-5048. Ask at card stores, wedding invitation shops and specialty paper stores for names of other calligraphers.
One of the keys to saving time and reducing stress at the holidays is to do things only once, like standing in line to buy stamps and mail packages. Get your out-of-town mailing together and accomplish all your postal activity in one trip. Order by mail, phone or online or have the store send the package. Pay a teenager to stand in line for you.
The U.S. Postal Service hasn't determined yet which day will be the biggest mailing day of the season. (Whatever day you go to the post office likely will feel like a strong contender for that designation.) Because of the new security procedures, the postal service urges customers to mail early if you want your cards and packages to arrive before Christmas. Dec. 3 is the recommended "mail-no-later-than" date for air letters, cards and air parcel post to Africa and Central and South America; Dec. 10 for Asia, the Pacific Rim, Australia and New Zealand, the Caribbean, Mexico, Europe and the Middle East. For cards to our friends in Canada the deadline is Dec. 14.
Decorating
In an unsurprising statistic, 90 percent of women surveyed for Lands' End, the catalog company, said they will decorate their homes for the holidays. The areas most likely to be decorated are the family or great room (82 percent), mantel or entryway (76 percent), dining room (73 percent) and kitchen (56 percent). Four out of 10 decorate the bathroom, and 27 percent do some holiday decorating in at least one bedroom.
The survey showed that 84 percent will trim a tree, 77 percent will hang stockings and 70 percent will use special dinnerware on the table.
Elaine Sexton, a professional organizer in Tampa who leads workshops on handling the holidays, offers these decorating tips:
-- Replace some of the pictures you hang year-round with holiday images. Put a pretty Christmas card in an inexpensive frame; look in magazines for attractive images you can slip into a frame you already own and hang on the wall or place in a tabletop vignette.
-- Build on what you have and use all year round. In Sexton's foyer she routinely stands a vase of yellow roses atop a yellow shabby-chic table. For her holiday color scheme of white, yellow and gold, she'll add yellow poinsettias and spruce and stack up some holiday books with white and gold covers.
-- "Keep extra white, gold and silver spray paint on hand," she recommends. "Everyday things can be transformed really quickly -- plate stands, wood boxes, flower pots -- and added to a vignette."
-- Early in the season, wrap some empty boxes with elaborate ribbon and paper and create a tabletop vignette or put them under the tree before you've done your gift shopping and wrapping. "It adds a lot of pizzazz," Sexton said.
O Christmas tree
It's hard to predict how many Christmas trees will be sold this year, a spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association said. Some growers are predicting an increase over last year's 32.1-million trees, figuring that more people may stay home this year rather than travel and will want a back-to-tradition celebration with friends and family, and that means a tree. Typically, people say a reason for a treeless season is that they'll be away over the holidays.
Last year 31 percent of Americans chose a real tree, 49 percent artificial and 21 percent had no tree (the numbers add up to 101 because of rounding). Historically, most trees are sold on Thanksgiving weekend and the first week of December, but tree spokesman Rick Dungey pointed out that this year, "It's kind of weird. It's the longest possible time between Thanksgiving and Christmas," 34 days. That may determine when people buy their trees. Weather may enter into the decision also. If it's warm, "That helps the choose-and-cut farms; people like to go out and get their trees before it gets real, real cold, and that hurts the retail lots," he said.
Dungey estimated that this year's tree price would be close to last year's, which ranged from $4.23 to $7.73 per foot, with a mean price of $34.24.
Waiting until closer to Christmas doesn't guarantee a fresher tree. Most trees are cut from the first of October through mid November and have been drying out in the wind and sun for six to eight weeks at a wholesale lot or on a truck or railroad car. (Often they're sprayed with a green dye to give them a fresh look; winter is, after all, their dormant time.) If you buy from a tree lot, look for one that keeps the trees in water.
Measure the space where you plan to put the tree, both vertically and horizontally. At a tree lot or cut-your-own tree farm, where the ceiling is the sky, trees look smaller than they are.
Once you bring the tree home, don't lay it down on an asphalt or concrete surface. Heat reflected from that surface will burn the foliage. Don't drag the tree; that will remove needles at eye level. Hold the tree by the main trunk.
Make a fresh cut across the base of the trunk to remove an inch of trunk and immediately place the tree in water in a sheltered outdoor place out of the wind. A tree will absorb a gallon of water or more in the first 24 hours and one or more quarts per day thereafter. Check the water reservoir twice a day, and never let the tree run out of water.
Inside, keep the tree away from radiators, space heaters, TV sets and other sources of heat.
Most Florida-grown trees are sold at choose-and-cut farms. See the list of local farms elsewhere on this page.
Gift wrapping
Hallmark will sell 60-million feet of gift wrap this holiday season, and that doesn't include gift bags or boxes, or what other vendors sell. Unfurl all those rolls of Hallmark paper and they'd stretch 11,364 miles, or the length of 200,000 football fields.
On Christmas morning you may well think that all that paper is in your living room.
The experts always suggest setting up a gift-wrapping station. "Yeah, right," a North Pinellas woman snorted recently at a home basket party. "You mean the bedroom floor." The undisturbed gift-wrapping area may be easier dreamed than done, but here are some tips to make the process a little less stressful:
-- Gather the supplies you need: paper, tape, ribbon, tags, pens, scissors. Keep them in one place.
-- Wrap as you shop, or do one gift a day, or wrap every Thursday night from now till Christmas: any system that saves you from an all-night marathon on Dec. 23.
-- A gift in a bag with tissue is perfectly acceptable. If you're really coordinated, or simply want to eliminate unnecessary fuss, Real Simple magazine suggests choosing signature colors so everyone knows that any gift, any time of the year, in a yellow bag with turquoise tissue is always from you.
-- Time is money. Let the stores gift-wrap, or patronize the tables operated in the malls by charities that will wrap your gift for a donation.
-- If you're giving gifts of money, pick up cash or check holders at the card store.
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