What's a busy mom to do, then?
Take shortcuts. Try these brilliant holiday hacks that shorten your time-consuming Christmas traditions into compact activities that give you the same end result as the real thing.
Baking Cookies:
Empty a 5-pound bag of flour into your Shop-Vac, reverse the suction, and blow it into the kitchen. Give the kids a storebought tube of refrigerated cookie dough to fight over.
Family Pictures:
Instead of telling your kids to "Say Cheese!" try saying "Alright everyone! Fingers in mouth or stare at something to your left!" For the first year ever you'll get family photos that look exactly the way you expected them to.
Christmas Cards:
Scratch out "Happy Holidays" at the top. Use Sharpies and correct them to say "Happy Groundhog's Day." Now you have plenty of time to address and mail them.
Shopping:
Circle the nearest parking lot 15 times looking for a spot, then turn around and go home. They wouldn't have had what you're looking for in stock anyway, so you've just accomplished in 20 minutes what would have ordinarily taken hours.
Pictures with Mall Santa:
Next time you're in a waiting room of some type, dump your baby on the lap of the random stranger next to you and take a picture of her screaming.
Decorating the Christmas tree:
Invite a local wino or hospital patient who's high on post-operative painkillers to put ornaments on your tree while you go run some errands. In the end, it will look exactly like your kids did it!
Advent Calendar:
The calendar itself is unnecessary. All you need to do is:
- Set a timer for 5 minutes; tell the kids to see who can yell loudest "IT'S MY TURN TO OPEN IT!"
- When the timer goes off, give everyone a piece of chocolate and stress-eat the rest of the bag locked in the bathroom.
- Repeat nightly.
Optional: if you have a preschooler, give him an entire bag on Day 3 when he would have opened all the little flaps himself out of curiosity.
Making Gingerbread Houses:
Scatter icing, crumbs, and tiny candies all over the dining room. Make sure all of it is hard and tasteless.
Driving Around to Look at Christmas Lights:
Tell the kids to whine from the backseat that they're bored, there's nothing to see, and they want to go home during a regular errand you need to run.
Wrapping Gifts:
On Christmas Eve, rip 10 rolls of festive paper into crumpled shreds and throw them all over the living room. Hide the kids' unwrapped toys beneath the carnage and they'll still be surprised on Christmas morning.
Busy moms know that creating a super-magical holiday season often takes more time than they have available.
By using these tips to simplify common Christmas traditions, you too can continue making holiday memories on top of your already demanding schedule of making sure everyone has clean underwear and dislodging Shopkins from the printer.
Merry Christmas!
4 comments:
Hahaha! This is amazing. The mall Santa one made me laugh out loud :) And I assume you've seen the Studio C Advent Calendar sketch, yes? That so accurately portrayed my relationship with chocolate filled Advent calendars ;)
We did a gingerbread house with the littlest people this year (not all that little anymore, 4 and 6). What honestly surprises me is that they wanted to eat it afterwards. They ate the house last year, too. I simply can't imagine actually having the desire to gnaw away at cardboard-fake-gingerbread topped with random candies chosen more for decorative appeal than actual flavor.
Yes, and the icing that is 99% flour and SO NASTY! It makes my stomach turn just thinking about it.
Hahahaha. Excellent suggestions.
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