Bonus Episode 10: Procrastinator’s Christmas Prep Plan – Day 10 – Food Prep & Baking Tips

Holiday Food and Baking, Without the Pressure

Menu planning is a genuine weak spot for a lot of us, the kind of thing that’s easy to avoid thinking about until it’s suddenly five o’clock and dinner needs to exist. The holidays add two extra layers to that: the meal itself, and the baking. Neither has to be complicated.

A quick daily check-in first

Before diving into food, it’s worth keeping a simple daily rhythm going through the busy season: glance at your open-ended pending list each morning and see what catches your interest to tackle that day, check the calendar for anything time-sensitive coming up, take stock of the gift list while there’s still time to run errands, and grab a few spare minutes to wrap something if the mood strikes. Four small check-ins, nothing more.

The meal itself doesn’t have to be homemade

If cooking isn’t a strength, or the holiday meal itself doesn’t hold much excitement compared to other parts of the day, it’s completely fine to lean on help. Plenty of grocery stores and restaurants offer a full holiday meal ready to pick up and reheat, and it still feels festive on the table. Another option is letting a family member who genuinely loves hosting take the lead, while you show up with something simple like rolls. There’s no rule that says the meal has to be built entirely from scratch to count.

Baking has a sliding scale, and every point on it is valid

At the simplest end, store-bought decorated cookies from a grocery store or bakery are a perfectly good stand-in. One step up, cookie decorating kits, someone else bakes and packages the icing and sprinkles, and all that’s left is the fun part. Another easy option is the pre-made refrigerated dough that slices and bakes with a built-in design, kids get the experience of “helping bake” without anyone needing to manage a real recipe. And if baking truly is your thing, or the one time of year you go all in, that’s worth planning for deliberately: pick the recipe, snap a photo of it for the grocery store trip, and actually schedule the baking time on the calendar so it doesn’t get lost in everything else.

Your practical, actionable step

Decide today which end of the spectrum fits this year, store-bought, semi-homemade, or fully from scratch, for both the meal and the baking, and let that decision be enough. There’s no version of this that requires doing all of it, or doing it the hard way, to count as a real holiday.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.