Staying Organized in the Last Weeks before Christmas

Professional organizer Beth Randall is the owner of Joe Organizer in Plainfield. Ideally, she said, organizing for the holidays would have begun much earlier than right now.

"My very first tip I would tell you is you need to start getting ready for the holidays right after Halloween," Randall told Channahon-Minooka Patch in an interview last year. "People sometimes wait until after Thanksgiving to start getting ready for Christmas, but that's not always the same amount of time."

Thanksgiving came early this year. However, it is already eight days into December. But it's not too late to get and stay organized for the rest of the countdown.

Randall offers the following tips on getting back on track for the holidays.

• Don't wait until the last minute to buy gifts.

"The more you wait the more you are going to spend," she said.

• Now is the time to organize a cookie exchange so you know what you are baking and can plan when to begin.

"That's a good thing to do the first week in December, you can freeze them and then most of them last very, very nicely," she said.

• Set up a wrapping station in your house, somewhere where paper, scissors, a pen and tape, for example, are all in one place. And, she said, wrap your gifts as you get them home.

In addition to Randall being a great resource to keep organized, I happened across a Web site with a weekly checklist for getting organized, specifically for Christmas. This week (that began Dec. 2), the site encourages us to focus on storage space. Learn more about all the tips by clicking here.