Twelve Weeks of a Simple Christmas: Week One Mission

Your mission this week, should you choose to accept it (and I recommend you do), is the first of three steps of the planning stage. Our planning missions deal with time, money, and food. Because I value time over money and slightly more than food, we will begin there.

The first thing I want you to plan is to plan to not over-plan. Commit to not overfilling your schedule, overextending your family, and spreading yourself like butter scraped over too much bread. Make this commitment, and then remind yourself of it every single time you’re tempted to overbook your Christmas. (More on this next time.)

Now, time for the Christmas schedule planning.

Grab your calendar (or your calendar app) and write down (or type) the following:

Where you will be for all the upcoming holidays and when. If you are traditionally at a certain person’s house or you stay home, this should be simple. If you rotate annually or have no set pattern, work on getting those details nailed down this week.
Add in all the activities you choose to be a part of. Some you know right now, but others are still sketchy–write them down as soon as the invitations or notices come in, such as church programs or office parties. Call people for info if you need it. Do it!
Write down all deadlines and requirements–shopping deadlines, card-mailing deadlines, shipping deadlines, cookie-baking for a school party, packing days…you know the drill.
Schedule in downtime and family fun, or you won’t have it. Include your family in this. Ask them what they absolutely want to do this Christmas to ensure their favorite holiday fun is included. This is super important!

Need some ideas of what could be on your calendar? Consider these to get the ol’ hamster in the head running and the idea wheel turning:

Set a gift-buying deadline.
Schedule a family Christmas photo picture day. If it’s a pro session, call today and set it up. Today!
Set a card-mailing deadline if you do cards.
Set a wrapping deadline.
Set a shipping deadline well ahead of the USPS’ deadline.
Set a stocking stuffer shopping deadline.
Choose a decorating day.
Pick a gift wrapping day or deadline if you wrap as you go.
Set a deadline for any homemade gifts you’re making.
Do you bake? Set grocery shopping and baking deadlines.
Add your kids’ and spouse’s school and office Christmas functions.
Add club and church functions if you know about them.
Call nearby relatives and ask about their kids’ events.
Write in any set family events, like the New Year’s Eve party your aunt holds every year.
Schedule in family fun: movie night, Christmas light viewing, attending the live nativity, delivering cookies to shut-ins, Christmas caroling, craft day–whatever you want to do.

Simple! Now grab that calendar and get it done! You can do this! You can have a peaceful Christmas–start today.

For more guidance in scheduling your Christmas without feeling stretched, buy my book, From Frazzled to Festive: Finding Joy and Meaning in a Simple Christmas.

Did you do it? Did you start your planning?

Holding myself accountable: Each week I will tell you what I have done to follow the missions. Since this is the first week, and there technically shouldn’t be pre-mission homework, I’m in the clear. Next week, however, is a different story!

Twelve Weeks of a Simple Christmas 2017

It’s time once again to start thinking about Christmas. Whether you go all out or you buy a box of Oreos and eat them all while singing Away in a Manger, Christmas will be here before you know it. I want you to be prepared. That is why I am once again running my annual series entitled Twelve Weeks of a Simple Christmas. It’s like the song Twelve Days of Christmas, except I won’t sing it. You’re welcome.

Here’s the lowdown:

This series will obviously be about twelve weeks long…unless, of course, Christmas is cancelled, I move to a country chalet in France our nine-year-old has been begging for, or I just plain quit so I have more time for my new crazy book about our crazy ol’ life, any of which could happen.

This is what you’ll find here over The Twelve Weeks of Christmas:

Christ focus–SIMPLE ways to keep the Christmas focus heavenward
a weekly goal to accomplish so the basics are ready on time and you’re not rushed. I’m talking basics.
AFFORDABLE and SIMPLE gift ideas, mostly posted on Facebook as I find them, but there will also be a running list posted on the blog to ignite ideas in your noggin (you’re on the blog now–don’t panic.)
a few simple and fun recipes, activity, and craft ideas that I want you to completely ignore if you don’t have time for them. I’ll be ignoring them right along with you.
thoughts on a simple holiday season and what really matters–spoiler alert: Jesus, others, you (Joy).
shameless plugging of my book From Frazzled to Festive: Finding Joy and Meaning in a Simple Christmas. Also, lots of honesty.

Notice the theme? SIMPLE!

Our missions are as follows:

Week 1: Plan Your Schedule
Week 2: Plan Your Budget
Week 3: Plan Your Gifts
Week 4: Plan Your Meals
Week 5: Wrapping Station
Week 6: Decoration Prep
Week 7: Take Your Photos and Order Your Cards
Week 8: Mail Cards and Freeze Cookie Dough
Week 9: Wrap and Deliver Gifts
Week 10: Laundry (Church Outfits, Guest Bedding, Table Cloth, Gift PJs)
Week 11: Wrap Up Loose Ends
Week 12: Help Others

If you’re looking for a Martha Stewart Christmas or an over-booked calendar, you’re on the wrong blog. Sorry–except I’m not. If you’re interested in spending more time enjoying the people in your life, the chocolate in your pantry, and the pillow in your bedroom, and less time running around like a frazzled frazzly thing, stick around!

Also, check out my book, From Frazzled to Festive: Finding Joy and Meaning in a Simple Christmas. It will give your head an overhaul and help you put the joy back in Christmas, which is a great pre-Christmas gift for anyone! (Told you I’d be plugging that baby!)

Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on any Christmas updates. You can also follow my Christmas pinboard where these links will be posted regularly…unless of course I move to France or Christmas is cancelled. It could happen.

If there’s anything specific, simple, and doable you would like to see here over the Twelve Weeks of a Simple Christmas, or if there is a topic you would like me to ramble about from my simple perspective, please leave a comment. I love your comments…unless you’re a spammer. Then, not so much.

What would you like to see here in the next twelve weeks?

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Deviled Eggs Recipe and Stuffed Egg Chicks

This basic deviled eggs recipe is open to a lot of variations, including the stuffed egg chicks down below. Enjoy.

Deviled Eggs Recipe

Ingredients

12 hard-boiled eggs
1/2 cup mayonnaise (or to your preference)
2 teaspoons mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch of pepper, optional
paprika
optional green onions, red bell peppers, or any other pretty garnish

Directions

Peel eggs. (Read How To Boil an Egg and Peeling Hard-Boiled Eggs for perfect eggs—easy to peel and a beautiful color.)

Cut the eggs in half lengthwise.

Remove the yolks to a bowl and break them apart with a fork.

Add mayonnaise one spoonful at a time until you’ve reached your desired moisture level. Add mustard and salt to taste.

Combine until smooth or the texture of your choice.

Spoon or pipe into the egg white hollows.

Sprinkle with paprika, or top with red peppers or green onions if desired.

Deviled Eggs Recipe Tips

For perfect hard-boiled eggs with bright yellow yolks, click here.

Wipe the knife after cutting each egg to keep the whites clean.

Cool eggs are easier to slice cleanly than warm eggs.

If desired, spoon the filling into a plastic bag, seal, and snip the corner off. Squeeze the bag to pipe the filling into the eggs.

If you mess up some of the eggs while peeling, throw them in with the yolks to mash into filling. Click here for easy-peel eggs.

Here’s the printable version:

Deviled Eggs Recipe

Recipe Type: Appetizer

Author: Christy, The Simple Homemaker

This basic deviled eggs recipe lends itself to a lot of variations to suit your fancy.

Ingredients

12 hard-boiled eggs
1/2 cup mayonnaise (or to your preference)
2 teaspoons mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch of pepper, optional
paprika
optional green onions, red bell peppers, or any other pretty garnish

Instructions

Peel eggs.
Cut the eggs in half lengthwise.
Remove the yolks to a bowl and break them apart with a fork.
Add mayonnaise one spoonful at a time until you’ve reached your desired moisture level. Add mustard and salt to taste.
Combine until smooth or the texture of your choice.
Spoon or pipe into the egg white hollows.
Sprinkle with paprika, or top with red peppers or green onions if desired.

Notes

Wipe the knife after cutting each egg to keep the whites clean.
Cool eggs are easier to slice cleanly than warm eggs.
If desired, spoon the filling into a plastic bag, seal, and snip the corner off. Squeeze the bag to pipe the filling into the eggs.
If you mess up some of the eggs while peeling, throw them in with the yolks to mash into filling.
To learn how to boil and peel perfect eggs, visit www.TheSimpleHomemaker.com

Deviled Eggs Recipe for Stuffed Egg Chicks

For a fun alternative, try these stuffed egg chicks:

Cut a small slice off the wide bottom so the egg stands flat.

Cut the top off. Remove the yolk.

Make the filling as directed above in the deviled eggs recipe. Pipe or spoon the filling back into the larger white segment and top with the small white piece.

Add olive slices or raisins for eyes and a carrot segment for a beak.

Feel free to give your newly formed friends a little personality.

Deviled Eggs Recipe and Stuffed Egg Chicks — “Okay, Kids, who yolked up in my shell!”

What is your family’s unique twist on the basic deviled eggs recipe?

How to Boil, Peel, and Use Up Hard-Boiled Eggs

Last year I posted several articles about hard-boiled eggs. They were some of my most popular posts of all time. Apparently, you people are all about the incredible edible egg! And why not! Eggs are awesome. In honor of the amazing egg, here is a round-up of my best hard-boiled egg posts, as well as some newbies.

Check out this picture sent in by my sister-in-law, Karen, one of my most faithful readers from Wisconsin. It shows the difference between their old method of boiling and peeling eggs and the new method they learned right here at The Simple Homemaker. Now that’s a gorgeous egg!

Do you want gorgeous eggs? Easy as pie! Easier, really. Just follow these directions:

How to Boil a Perfect Hard-Boiled Egg

How to Peel Hard-Boiled Eggs

And if you need simple ideas for what to do with all those hard-boiled eggs, here are a few simple recipes from The Simple Homemaker:

Basic Egg Salad Recipe

Deviled Eggs and Stuffed Egg Chicks

10 Ways to Use Leftover Hard-Boiled Eggs

And here are some ideas sent in by some of my blogging friends (and my blogging daughter) from around the globe:

Stacy Makes Cents’ Mama’s Egg Salad – See what a splash of vinegar can do!

Raising the Barrs’ A Salad A Day – Hard-boiled eggs are just one of the ways she spruces up salads.

The Nourishing Home’s Avocado Egg Salad – Really? Yes, really! It looks fabulous!

Horse Crazy Bookworm’s Totally Brilliant Easter Recipes – Technically, not all of these use hard-boiled eggs, but they’re shaped like eggs, and they’re chocolate, so…close enough. (Just go with it.)

For more ideas, I created a Pinterest board entitled Using Up Hard-Boiled Eggs. It’s about using up hard-boiled eggs. Appropriately named, don’t you think? Check it out for more ideas.

Using Up Hard-Boiled Eggs on Pinterest

I hope this egg post is eggsactly what you were looking for.

Grooooaaaaaaannnnnn!

Feel free to link up any of your recipes for leftover hard-boiled eggs in the comments!

Special thanks to Karen for sending in the results of her egg experiment!

Chocolate Bunny Oatmeal — A Fun Easter Breakfast Your Kids Will Love

There are many ways to celebrate Easter with food, and many of them point directly to the Resurrection, such as this Jelly Bean Gospel or these Resurrection Rolls or these Resurrection Cookies. Chocolate Bunny Oatmeal has nothing to do with anything. It’s just plain fun. That happy, oblivious little bunny has no idea what’s about to transpire.

Serve up bowls of piping hot oatmeal and stick a chocolate bunny smack dab in the center.

As the bunny melts in the hot lava death hot cereal, it will transform the oatmeal into chocolaty goodness!

That’s all there is to it!

Tips:

To help the bunny stand up and create a better effect, make thicker oatmeal by using less liquid than usual.

The oatmeal must be served hot.

Don’t add milk or coconut cream or whatever you add until the bunny has worked its little bunny magic.

Adjust the chocolaty goodness by using a larger or smaller rabbit.

The teeny tiny one-bite bunnies are really too small, so have chocolate chips on hand to add some yum.

Solid rabbits are not going to melt as quickly or completely as hollow bunnies, unless they are small. We used small solids (7/$1) and they melted fine.

Make this after Easter when the bunnies are being unloaded cheap.

Don’t serve this on a morning when your kids will be expected to sit still and quiet for an hour. Ahem.

This works great for a no-life-lesson breakfast around Christmas, too. Stick a Santa in it.

You know this idea is going to nag you until you try it, so just give in!

Come back here and let us know how it turned out!

Simple, Frugal, and Charming {Last-Minute} Thanksgiving Decorations

I love decorating for special occasions, but I don’t like spending money on it. I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on holiday décor that I will forever worry that my children will mess up. Can I have an Amen? Little louder next time, please.

AMEN!

Thank you.

In my opinion, humble though it is, Thanksgiving is one of the easiest holidays to decorate for, if–and that’s a great big imposing if like this:

IF

–if you keep it simple.

Here are some simple ideas for decorating for Thanksgiving:

Decorate with produce.

Set apples, pears, and pomegranates in a large glass or ceramic bowl, in a trifle dish, or on a raised cake platter. Fill a glass bowl with cranberries and set a candle in a slimmer glass container inside. After the event, eat them. Eat them all! Or make pie. Mmmm…pie. There is no finer food.

Here’s an old photo (forgive the quality) of a centerpiece we threw together a few years ago. We hollowed out some of the apples to use as candle holders. (Don’t eat those.) We added some pine cones, a pillar candle, and fake leaves and berries (you could use real leaves and cranberries). It was quite charming and made entirely from what we had on hand. (I see a pecan pie in the background. Mmmm…pie.)

Decorate with nature.

We live in the desert, and bringing in a cactus or two isn’t very festive this time of year. Leaves, on the other hand, are beautiful. If you have fall leaves, bring them in, press them under a book, preserve them with modge podge, spray veneer, or laminate. Pinecones are also lovely. Fill a basket with pine cones and maybe some wooden beads. (Pinterest will hook you up, if you need ideas. Run a Pinterest search for leaf or pinecone crafts.)

Nature is beautiful. You really can’t do better, so why not bring it indoors. God didn’t copyright his work, so go ahead and use it; just remember to give credit where credit is due.

Let the kids work their magic.

There is a certain charm in a home decorated with handprint turkeys, a child-personalized napkin ring set, thumbprint place cards, a paper table cloth the kids decorate as they’re waiting for the turkey, and other works of art! Save them (not the table cloth) and set them out year after year to see how the littles have grown into middles and biggles. You may want to skip that last part if the reminder of the rapid passing of years makes you cry into the pie. (Mmmm…pie.)

Add something handmade each year.

Try a simple (I said SIMPLE) project, like this one that took my four-year-old 15 minutes and which used materials we had in the house.

Isn’t that cute? Learn how to make it here.

Browse some other simple, yet beautiful ideas on my Thanksgiving board on Pinterest.

Decorating for Thanksgiving can be simple, cheap, and charming…but only if you remember the big IF…and have pie.

What are some simple ways you decorate for Thanksgiving?

And a more important question:

Are you serving pie?

Twelve Weeks of a Simple Christmas

I love Christmas. I hope you do, too, because this year I’m running a series entitled Twelve Weeks of A Simple Christmas. It’s like the song Twelve Days of Christmas, except I won’t sing it. You’re welcome.

Here’s the lowdown:

This series will obviously be about twelve weeks long…unless, of course, Christmas is cancelled or I move to a country chalet in Switzerland, or I just plain quit, any of which could happen.

This is what you’ll find here over The Twelve Weeks of Christmas:

Christ focus–SIMPLE ways to keep the Christmas focus heavenward
a weekly goal to accomplish so the basics are ready on time and you’re not rushed. I’m talking basics.
SIMPLE recipes–original or something I peeled off the mighty web
SIMPLE crafts or decoration ideas–sometimes just a link and some smarmy remarks from me
articles from me on various Christmas-related topics with a focus on keeping it SIMPLE.
SIMPLE, yet FUN family activities
AFFORDABLE and SIMPLE gift ideas

Notice the theme? SIMPLE!

Our missions are as follows:

Week 1: Plan Your Schedule
Week 2: Plan Your Budget
Week 3: Plan Your Gifts
Week 4: Plan Your Meals
Week 5: Wrapping Station
Week 6: Decoration Prep
Week 7: Take Your Photos and Order Your Cards
Week 8: Mail Cards and Freeze Cookie Dough
Week 9: Wrap and Deliver Gifts
Week 10: Laundry (Church Outfits, Guest Bedding, Table Cloth, Gift PJs)
Week 11: Wrap Up Loose Ends
Week 12: Help Others

If you’re looking for a Martha Stewart Christmas or an over-booked calendar, oops…you’re on the wrong blog. Sorry–except I’m not. If you’re interested in spending more time enjoying the people in your life and the pillow in your bedroom, and less time running around like a frazzled frazzly thing, stick around!

Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on any Christmas updates. You can also follow my Christmas pinboard where these links will be posted regularly…unless of course I move to Switzerland or Christmas is cancelled. It could happen.

If there’s anything specific, simple, and doable you would like to see here over the Twelve Weeks of Christmas, or if there is a topic you would like me to ramble about from my simple perspective, please leave a comment. I love your comments…unless you’re a spammer. Then…not so much.

What would you like to see here in the next twelve weeks?

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