A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest for a chill Christmas.

My goal is a Christmas season that doesn’t feel like it’s chasing me, and I have discovered that the secret to this is surprisingly boring:

Be a tiny bit more prepared.

That’s it.

Do a few things in October instead of December. Buy a stocking stuffer when you happen to see one. Freeze some cookie dough. Make a list of the people you’re actually buying for. Decide what you want Christmas to feel like before you’re standing in Target on December 19th wondering why you’re suddenly buying a $27 candle for someone you barely know.

I wrote that post because this is something I’m continually learning myself: Christmas gets a whole lot more enjoyable when Future Me has been taken care of by Past Me.

And that idea is what eventually became my Christmas planner.

I wanted a Christmas planner that felt like Christmas.

There are approximately a million Christmas planners on the internet.

A lot of them are very good, but I wanted something a little different.

I didn’t want a planner that made Christmas feel like another project I needed to optimize. I didn’t want twelve pages of spreadsheets that made me feel like I was managing a small corporation. I wanted something that made me want to sit down with a maple latte and think about Christmas.

So I made one.

The planner includes space for things like:

• How you want the holidays to feel
• Christmas budgeting
• Gift planning
• Meaningful gift ideas
• Handmade gift ideas
• Stocking stuffers
• Holiday meals
• Christmas preparations
• Wrapping and other little details
• A running checklist to help spread things out before December

Basically, all the little things that have a tendency to live in the back of your brain for three months and then suddenly become an emergency.

And that’s really what I wanted this planner to do.

Get the Christmas thoughts out of my head and onto paper.

The goal isn’t to do more.

This is probably the most important part. I don’t want this planner to convince you that you need to do more for Christmas, quite the opposite.

I want it to help you figure out what actually matters to your family and then make it happen.

If you don’t want to make twelve kinds of Christmas cookies, don’t, if you don’t send Christmas cards, that’s okay. If your Christmas dinner is a ham and a bagged salad because you’re tired, God bless you. If you love making handmade gifts for everyone you know, wonderful. The point isn’t to create somebody else’s beautiful Christmas.

It’s to create yours.

Once you’ve figured out what that looks like, a little preparation can go a surprisingly long way.

A little preparation is a kindness to yourself.

The Christmas of your dreams probably isn’t going to happen because you suddenly become extremely disciplined on December 1st.

It’s much more likely to happen because October-you bought the stocking stuffers.

November-you ordered the gifts.

You made the freezer cookies.

You decided what you were making for Christmas dinner.

You wrote down the things you wanted to remember.

And then December-you gets to sit on the couch with the Christmas tree lights on and actually enjoy December.

That’s the dream.

So if you read my earlier post about creating a chill Christmas by being just a tiny bit more prepared, this planner is essentially that idea turned into something you can hold in your hands.

I’ve put the printable Christmas Planner in my Etsy shop if you’d like to make your own Christmas a little chiller this year.

Print it at home, tuck it into a binder, grab your favorite pen, and start thinking about what you want your Christmas to feel like.

Future You will thank you.