It’s still officially summer for another week and a half, but my mind has already started focusing on The Holidays.

I like to plan ahead and not get blindsided by them.  I mean…  Christmas falls on December 25th every year.  It doesn’t change, it doesn’t rotate…  It’s December 25th.  Thanksgiving is a little trickier – the 4th Thursday in November – but still… a little planning never hurts.

We’ll be hosting Thanksgiving at our house, again this year.  It’s pretty much tradition, so we’ll have to start planning the ridiculous excess next month some time.  I actually create an excel spreadsheet of what we’re making, who will be here, and then I look back at blog posts to see what we did and what it looked like.

Organized.

It’s how I quantity cook without getting stressed.  It helps to have a plan.

We do the same thing with the Christmas baking, although quantities there have been drastically reduced over the years.  At our height, we were baking between 6 and 8 thousand cookies every year.  It started to get a bit ridiculous – not to mention expensive.  We’ll be making considerably less – although still way too many.

And then there’s the fruitcakes, the stollen, the Christmas pudding…  The last three items need to be made way in advance so they can properly age before Christmas.  Stir-Up Sunday is about 5 weeks before Christmas – the last Sunday before Advent – and a traditional day to make Christmas puddings, but that’s also the Sunday after Thanksgiving and our Decorating Weekend.  Methinks I’ll be scheduling fruitcakes and pudding for late October and early November…

Yep…  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas – even if the weather still says summer!