Holiday Bonus Episode 3: Permission to Pause – Prioritize Holiday Joy Over Perfect

The Holidays Don’t Need Your Clean Bathroom

Let’s talk about events for a minute, because this time of year they pile up fast. Before anything else, stop and get every party, recital, and gathering onto your calendar — pull it from emails, kids’ school websites, wherever it’s hiding. Bonus points for adding phone alerts. While you’re at it, highlight anything special each one requires: a certain outfit, a dish to bring, a wrapped gift exchange item. Build one list of all of it and snap a photo on your phone, so it’s in front of you the next time you’re out running errands and can grab what you need in one pass instead of remembering an hour before you’re supposed to walk out the door.

Do the fun stuff. Pause everything else.

Here’s the somewhat controversial part. A mom’s post crossed my feed recently pushing back on the usual holiday advice to “just do less.” Her point: the holiday stuff — baking cookies, decorating, going to the fun events — is the stuff she actually wants to do. The problem isn’t too many holiday activities. It’s that we’re still trying to carry all our normal household stuff on top of them.

So if you won’t be hosting anyone, consider pausing the regular stuff entirely for the next couple of weeks. Skip the bathrooms. Don’t change the sheets. Do only the laundry that’s truly urgent. Let dinner on non-event nights be cereal or a can of soup. Your family will survive. Pour whatever energy you have into what you actually want this season to be about.

Here’s the reassuring part: your future self in January will have a full battery for exactly this kind of reset. Look at when organizing and storage products flood every store — right after Christmas, timed precisely for the fresh-start energy everyone gets once the season’s over. Let future-you, who’ll actually have the capacity for it, handle the reset. Right now isn’t that moment, and that’s genuinely fine.

If you are hosting, only clean what will be seen

The same logic applies, just narrower. If guests are only going to see a guest room and a guest bathroom, that’s the only real estate that needs attention. Your own bedroom, your kids’ bathroom, whatever’s behind a closed door — shut the door. Nobody needs to know.

You’re allowed to skip an event, too

If you’re looking over your event list and some of it is genuine excitement and some of it is pure obligation, give yourself permission to decline the obligation ones. “We already have a conflict that night” is a complete sentence — you don’t owe anyone the details. And if that phrasing feels like a lie, reframe it: scheduling in actual peace and margin on a night you’re supposed to be somewhere is itself an event. An RSVP of “no” in favor of quiet counts as a legitimate use of that evening.

Batch it all in one trip

Once you know what each event actually requires, fold that into whatever errands you’re already running — dropping kids off, holiday shopping, anywhere you’re already headed. Try to knock out as many of those “oh, I need that for this party” items as you can in one outing, so you’re not discovering a wardrobe requirement or a potluck dish an hour before you need it.

Your practical, actionable step

Get every event on your calendar today, with alerts. Snap a photo of anything special each one needs. Then decide, honestly, which ones you’re excited for and which ones you’re allowed to skip — and let the rest of the house wait until January.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.