Advent and Christmas Notebook

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Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year, and potentially the most stressful!

Fortunately, Advent and Christmas do not have to be as stressful if you have all of your Advent and Christmas information in the same place. Enter the Christmas Notebook!

A Christmas Notebook is the place where you can keep all of the little lists, gift ideas, recipes that you see throughout the year and think “I’d like to try that!”. Pinterest is great for so many things, but even Pinterest can be completely overwhelming and doesn’t hold all of your pertinent information at your fingertips.

*Calendars

*Gift Lists

*Recipes

*Feast Day Ideas

*Christmas Card Addresses

*Past Christmas Cards – this is my favorite!

*Decorating Ideas

*Cleaning Checklists

*Any other list that keeps you organized

Christmas Notebook Layout

Here is quick tour of my Advent/Christmas notebook. As I mentioned it is very simple and basic, but it works. Each year I add or modify a bit to better fit what I need. A 3-ring binder makes it super simple to add/pull out pages as needed. It stick with a 1″ binder and that is big enough for what I need.

First, I have a list of the gifts we gave last year as well as all the receipts. I will move this to the back of my notebook soon to make room for receipts for this year.

I print out a new November and December calendar, depending on when Advent starts, and put it in the front. This is where I jot down our events for the month. I could just do this in my regular life planner, but I like having everything for the month in one spot. I will jot down the Feast of St Nicholas – it is the Patron Saint of Russia and we always do the kids stockings on this night. We celebrate St. Lucy’s Feast Day by getting hot chocolate and driving around to look at Christmas lights. We look forward to these two feast days all year long!

My new gift giving list for the year. I have recipes that I have used for gift giving,

as well as a pocket that I can stuff gift ideas in throughout the year.

The next section is where I keep some decorating ideas.

I like to rip out things from magazines that I might use for inspiration. However, this is mostly just my “dreaming” section for right now. Â Last year I was happy we got the tree up! Now days my decorating is pretty simple, but we still have special things that we do. As the kids get older they like to get more involved in how we decorate and often have great ideas of their own. It’s fun for them to pick out pictures of ideas that they like. It’s super simple to stick magazine pages in page protectors.

This part is where I keep my Christmas card address list as well as past Christmas cards. If I get any address changes throughout the year I can stick them in the pocket if I don’t have time to change the address right away. <— Huge time saver!! Also, when it comes time to order my Christmas cards, I know exactly how many I need. I am a nerd about our Christmas cards!

Next is my recipe section and list of Christmas cookies we like to make each year. Also, last year we ended up staying home on Christmas day, so we decided to do a Christmas Around the World. We had something from Russia, Korea, and the Caribbean. Here is where I keep the recipes that I used. That was a fun dinner and I am hoping we do it again this year.

Christmas Cookie Ideas

There you have it. Simple, but it does help me to stay more organized through a busy holiday season.

All sorts of pages are available from Organized Christmas. You can get gift ideas, lists for house cleaning for the holidays etc. My hope is that with a few minutes of prep work to pull this together, you will experience a richer and more meaningful Advent and Christmas season. Not a “Pinterest perfect” holiday season, but an easy way to spend your time on the things that matter the most.