#Holiday stress will really start to #snowball after Thanksgiving. Why not get some of your baking out of the way now? There are plenty of #recipes you can make ahead of time and pull out of the freezer to enjoy at a later date, Parade says. Homemade cookies and confections such as peppermint bark, peanut brittle, sugar cookies, gingerbread, fudge and (everyone’s favorite) peanut butter blossoms can be baked weeks in advance. Freeze them and thaw them out a few hours before giving them as a gift in a festive tin or plating them for the holiday feast. You’ll have more time to relax and enjoy the celebration! #HolidayTips
Tag: holiday giving
Look for Last-Minute Gifts at the Thrift
With only two days to go until #Christmas, you might want to check the options at a #thrift store supplied by generous #donations to ClothingDonations.org if you’re short on #gifts. Not only do they offer plenty of lightly used goods at nice prices, you can often find unique #gifts that might be just right for a particular person on your list if you browse for a few minutes, no shipping required. And if you’re feeding a crowd over the weekend, you can get necessities such as linens, baking pans, serverware and other essentials for the holiday table — and maybe even the perfect ugly #holiday sweater or white elephant #gift. #HolidayTips
Three Shopping Days Until Christmas
With just three shopping days before #Christmas, it’s go time on the gifts you forgot to get or procrastinated on. Gift cards and cash are fine for a lot of people, but if you want to make it look like you gave a lot of thought to your giftee’s needs, your choices have now winnowed to Amazon, something digital or something sourced locally. Good Housekeeping suggests 55 good last-minute gifts — some of which deliver electronically and won’t create #clutter, and some of which will keep help everything clean, like an in-car vacuum. And subscription boxes for cheese, self-care, flowers or craft beet will keep giving throughout the year. #HolidayTips
Last-Minute Shopping After Dark
You may have to shop in the dark on the shortest day of the year in order to check everyone off your #list, but depending on what you want to buy, you won’t necessarily have to do it in person. Major retailers such as Amazon, Target and Macy’s can still deliver within three days, CBS News says, but today is the deadline for many shipments. You can always visit a physical store location for #last-minute convenience, or pick up a fistful of gift cards. Many mainstream #Christmas and #holiday traditions actually started as pagan winter solstice rituals, so you can also consider decorating an outdoor tree, lighting some luminaria or hanging some mistletoe, Mother suggests.
Go Digital for Last-Minute Gifts
Stuck for a last-minute #Christmas #gift? Go digital, says the Washington Post. While once seen as a lazy choice in gift-giving, digital options have been proliferated to the point where you can match a gift to everyone on your list. Pay for a niche streaming service; buy them an e-book, video game or mobile app; sponsor them for an online experience such as a cooking class or tarot card reading; or buy them a digital newsletter or magazine subscription. Not only do digital gifts take fewer resources to ship and deliver, the story says, they won’t add to the #clutter in one’s home. #HolidayTips