How to Plan for the Holidays in 2020

Holiday Planning in 2020 may feel like a dream. 

After Spring Break was cancelled, Summer Vacation was spent at home, and Fall Break involved masks and social distancing, a holly jolly holiday season seems out of reach. 

This year has certainly brought challenges, but the holidays can be just as merry and bright as ever! And taking the time to start preparing now will set you up for success. 

Here are my top five tips for planning for the holidays in 2020: 

Decide to be together. 

No matter what holiday you celebrate, the most important part of the holiday season is spending time with loved ones. While concerns for others health and safety along with travel restrictions and ever climbing airline ticket prices may prevent you from having a traditional holiday season, I want to give you an ever so gentle nudge to not throw in the towel and call the holidays a bust before they ever happen. 

If you always have your family and close friends over for a Thanksgiving meal, but your dining room is too cramped for everyone to distance properly, look into renting a large conference room or expo hall. (Your local fairgrounds are a great place to check!) If you have family who live thousands of miles away who can’t travel to see you this year, pick a day to have a virtual celebration. No, it won’t be the same. But I truly believe you’ll be glad you still got together as best you could when you’re looking back come January. 

Keep Up With Your Traditions

Along the same lines as making it a point to be together, no matter how that looks, keep up with as many holiday traditions as you can. If you always put up three Christmas trees, put those Christmas trees up! If your family usually has a big holiday baking party, schedule a zoom call where everyone can bake something while chatting on a video call. 

This year has carried sadness with it, there’s no doubt of that. But keep up with your special traditions because they are important to you. Keeping up with your traditions in uncertain times will give you an anchor point of familiarity, and you can remember all the years of happy memories as you make new, and admittedly unique, memories this year. 

Let Amazon be Santa Claus 

Did you know that you can order on Amazon and have your purchase delivered to pretty much any address? If you won’t be able to be with loved ones in person for a gift exchange, let Amazon take care of the shipping for you and have the gifts shipped straight to the recipients home. 

Here’s something that I only just recently learned: Amazon will wrap your gifts for you! They’ll put the box in pretty reusable bags (the bag is a gift in and of itself!) and it’ll arrive on your loved one’s doorstep ready to stick under the tree. Even if you’ll be having the holidays in person with family, you may still want to let Amazon do the wrapping for you! It costs a few extra dollars, but it’s a nice touch. 

Start a Collaborative Holiday Playlist 

Just because you’re physically apart doesn’t mean that you can’t share in the same holiday spirit! Create a collaborative playlist of your favorite holiday music and share it with family and friends (depending on the program you use, they can usually add their favorite songs to it too!) Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube are all great platforms to use for this. 

Plan Ahead for What You Can

Planning has been super duper hard this year. I mean, SUPER hard. Plans change at the last minute and that can be incredibly frustrating. It may feel tempting to not plan for the holidays at all seeing as everything is up in the air. But wouldn’t you rather have a plan in place so that things can run as smoothly as possible if things actually do go according to plan? Even if some parts of the plan have to change at the last minute, your plans will give you a starting point so you’re not flying blind when the holidays roll around. 

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to planning for the holiday season, I recommend grabbing my Printable Holiday Planner that’s on sale for over 50% off for a very limited time.  And just click below to see the Holiday Planner come to life.

With a little bit of forethought, creativity, and of course that Christmas cheer, you can still have a joy filled and peaceful holiday season, even in 2020.