Diana Rene: 0:06

You're listening to the Decluttered Mom Podcast, a podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom. I'm your host, Diana Rene. And in 2017, I had my second daughter, and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home. Okay, not literally, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me. Over the next 10 months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings, and I have never looked back. I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system, and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks, and encouragement. Let's listen to today's show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Decluttered Mom podcast. Today we're gonna talk about something that I call the holiday doc. Um, and this is something that I started many years ago now. I'm trying to remember, I believe it was 2019 that I began this. And the reason that this was even born, the reason that this was even an idea in the first place was because I was sitting on my laptop scrolling one evening. Yes, it was 2019, so it was December 2019, um, which oh my gosh, that is six years ago. What is life? That's wild. Anyway, so I was sitting there scrolling on Facebook and I saw a friend posted new photos and I looked at it and I was like, oh my gosh, zoo lights at the Denver Zoo. That's so fun. Oh my gosh, I didn't buy tickets, and I felt like a wave of like dread wash over me. And the reason I was so upset about this is because for two years prior, we had gone as a family to zoo lights, and it had become this new tradition that I really wanted to keep going because it was important to me when I had my own family with my own kids that I was able to create traditions. And there are traditions from my own childhood, from my husband's childhood that we wanted to carry on, but we also wanted to have like our own traditions that our kids can look back on with very fond memories and know that this is just part of the Christmas season, right?

And so we had gone the two years prior, and for whatever reason, you know, maybe just mom life, I had forgotten to buy tickets. And so I got onto the computer and I was like frantically searching for the Denver Zoo zoo lights, and I found the tickets page, and I'm like scrolling through all the dates, and it's just saying sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out. Like every date was sold out, and I just cried because I felt so bad. I felt like I had failed. Like I felt like I had this new idea, this new tradition. We had done it for two years. It was something that we all really enjoyed. It felt really magical. And I didn't buy the tickets and I felt like I failed.

And so that night I had my laptop and I was like, I have to figure out a way to not forget things like this. And obviously, this was not the only thing I forgot when the holidays came around, but this was just like it was all it was like a slap in the face where I was like, I have to figure out a way to be better organized.

And I remembered when I was younger, my mom had like this notebook that had all of this information about Christmas in it, mostly recipes, but other things as well. And I was like, I don't want a physical notebook because I will probably lose that or it'll get some things will spill on it. And I also don't want to be the only one in charge of this. I want my spouse to be able to be equally in charge of it and own it just as much. And so I decided to create a Google Doc and I called it the holiday doc.

And so I think before I called it something guide, but like over the years, I'm like the holiday doc just fits better. So I opened this Google Doc and I just started brain dumping, like putting everything in there that I could possibly think about for Christmas that I needed to try and remember. And here's the deal it didn't help very much because I was like in the season and it was hard because I was trying to remember from last year. And I don't know about you, but my brain has a hard time remembering things from last week, much less like 11, 12 months prior.

And so what I decided to do instead is through that holiday season, I just kept updating that document, kept it updating like constantly, like honestly, almost every day I was in that document updating things. Um, and so that way by the end of the season, I had everything in there that I needed to remember the following season. And I was able to go in, I was able to organize it, I was able to, you know, make it a little prettier and and like it wasn't just like a bunch of thoughts dumped onto pages. At that point, I was able to make it into more of an actual usable document.

But the following Christmas, oh my gosh, the level of stress it took off of me because it just had everything there. It had everything there that I needed to remember for Christmas. And it wasn't just the zoolights, like I did remember the next year to buy the zoolights tickets, but it was everything. It was everything that I needed to remember. And I just remember feeling so much relief because I think with Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, and if you don't, if any holiday that you celebrate, the magic making tends to fall on mom, right? Like whether or not that is something that should happen, that's another debate for another time, but it does. If if we want our kids to have this like magical holiday season, then most of the time mom is the one who has to create that magic for them and remember everything and do everything. And that can feel really overwhelming and really heavy in a season where we're supposed to be feeling really light and happy and jolly and joyful, right? And so this holiday doc, I just felt so much relief.

And I did talk about this in an episode last year, and we got a lot of emails and a lot of DMs from people asking me to send them the holiday doc. And I won't send you mine, number one, because it has a lot of personal information. It has all a lot of information about my kids and all that. But number two, my like what's going on in our season is not going to help you for your season. So as much as I wish I could send you like a pretty PDF document, that's not really gonna help you. What's gonna help you is for you to open a Google Doc today and start documenting. And like I said, this is not gonna be super helpful for you this season. It'll be a little helpful because it'll help you to get organized. But the magic in this is next year when you are able to really lean on it and really use it.

And so I wanted to give you just some ideas for some sections that will help you and can kind of get your brainstorming started. And then as you're adding things into it throughout the season, you can know you it'll just help you to keep it a little bit more organized as you go. And so these are the headers that I would start with. And then this is your document. This is a living, breathing document. Add whatever headers make sense for you, right?

So um for me, I put recipes, so I listed everything that I make each year. So these are like traditional things, so like Christmas Eve appetizers or Christmas breakfast, and then I paste the actual recipes um or link to them in there, and then I also add notes for timing. So like we make candied bacon um because that was a tradition that my dad made candied bacon every morning after Christmas. So like the day after Christmas.

So, okay, first of all, when I was a kid, we had a big, there was four of us. So me, I had two older brothers, and then there was me, and then I had a younger sister. My mom was one of four kids, so she had a big family. My dad's side, we didn't really they lived all over the US and we didn't really know them very well, but so mostly on my mom's side, my mom was the oldest of four siblings, and so and then all of her siblings had children, and all but one of them lived nearby, and all of them would come over to our house every Christmas day.

That was just the tradition. I don't know who decided that, but that's what it was for as for my entire childhood. Every Christmas I can remember that we would open um up Christmas presents in the morning, and then we would eat breakfast. We'd kind of have like an hour or two to like play with our new toys or whatever, put some of our gifts away in our room, and then family would start pouring in. And so we had a ton of cousins, we had all of our aunts and uncles, my grandparents there. Sometimes we even had neighbors over and they would spend all Christmas day with us, and we ate appetizers all day, so we would not actually have like a lunch. Um, we did have breakfast, but our breakfast was a coffee cake, like Entenmann's coffee cake. Raise your hand if you've ever had that. The best.

And then all afternoon we would just snack on these appetizers. My mom would pour over the stove for weeks leading up to Christmas. She would make things and then she would freeze them, um, and then she'd bring them all out on Christmas Day, and then she'd make all sorts of things on Christmas Day. So I'm talking like the entire dining room table was filled with food nonstop, hot plates and cookies and everything.

And so we would just snack all day long, and then we would have a late dinner, and she would always do a roast. So we never knew when dinner would actually be because it almost always took many hours longer than it was supposed to. So we would often have like a late dinner, and then they would all spend the night. And I remember when I was really little, there was one Christmas where there was a snowstorm, and so they had to spend the night. That was like not the tradition originally, um, but they had to spend the night because of the snowstorm, and then it was so much fun that they decided to make that the new tradition.

So they all spent the night at our house. I'm talking like all the cousins, all the aunts and uncles, my grandparents, like everybody spent the night at our house. So, like, we were all all the cousins, and um, we would all basically just like take over one of our rooms or the family room or whatever, and we would just camp out all night. And then the morning after Christmas, my dad would make candied bacon in pancakes.

So that was something that I wanted to carry in as a tradition, slightly improvise because I know I've talked about it on this podcast before. My dad passed away when I was 17. Um, and that was just such like a core memory for me is this candied bacon. It was so good. But I wanted to do it because we don't do the same tradition of everyone spending the night at our house. So we actually do candied bacon on Christmas Eve as just part of one of the things that we eat because we kind of do our appetizer, like snacking on appetizer meal as our Christmas Eve day, because that's when our immediate family is together at our house. That's like my favorite time because it's just us and we're just at our house, and we're just eating our Christmas appetizers and watching Christmas movies and hanging out, and it's just the best.

So I don't know where that tangent came from, but that candied bacon note made me go down memory lane.
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