Since November and December are two of the busiest months for jewelry artists, it’s helpful if you can prepare for your own holidays ahead of time.
Not only will you be able to take care of more jewelry orders, but you’ll also enjoy a much nicer holiday season on a personal level, with far less stress.
Although I’m aware of this, somehow this year I haven’t followed my own guidelines in this area!
Several years ago, after my first good year of selling jewelry, I realized that the end of the year could be so much more enjoyable if you’re not trying to do several shows, fill special orders, attend all kinds of holiday gatherings, and do your own shopping, Christmas cards, baking, etc. at the same time!
So after that first year I tried to make a point of deciding what I did and didn’t feel was important to do for my own holidays, and then finished most of the preparations by the beginning of November. I really enjoy everything so much more when I can take my time doing it, and when I’m not staying up till 2:00 a.m. signing Christmas cards and baking cookies with my eyelids propped open!
Here are a few of the things I’ve done by the beginning of November (in previous years!), to make our holidays less rushed and more fun:
I got all of our Christmas cards completely ready to mail and sitting in a nicely finished stack, so I had only to drop them in the mailbox at the end of November.
I did any of the holiday baking I could do ahead of time, and froze it till it was needed. You can do many cookie doughs and bread doughs this way. In fact, we discovered that it was great to mix up a huge batch of sugar cookie or gingerbread dough and freeze it in small packages. Then we could periodically thaw, roll out, cut, and bake a dozen or so cookies at a time – great for spur of the moment giving, or having a fresh holiday dessert to take to a party, or serving at home to guests!
I made/bought all of the gifts I was going to give. I wrapped them all and boxed the out-of-town ones so they’d be completely ready to be dropped off at the post office or handed to our mail carrier at the end of November. (I do my own postage online, so I never have to stand in line at the post office for the postage part of mailing packages.)
It’s not my nature to be a super-organized person who does things well ahead of time (obviously, since I haven’t done a thing yet this year!), but I found that it can make a HUGE difference in having your own stress-free, very enjoyable holidays.
The other key to more enjoyable holidays is to scale down. The simplicity feels much more “real”, and it allows everyone to actually experience and enjoy the season instead of spending the whole time working so hard to try to accomplish things.
I decided many years ago that I couldn’t spend my holidays trying to meet everyone else’s expectations. I used to dread the holidays, and that was part of the reason.
Now we discuss as a family what each of us would really like to do during the season, and focus on just those things. We’re not obligated to anything more. We have each person responsible for making the holidays what he or she wants, and enjoy sharing these things together.
If people outside of our immediate family expect or demand more than what we’ve decided to do, we can’t be accountable for meeting their expectations – that’s up to them. And if they get annoyed with us for that – well, they’re missing what the season is all about.
But anyway, I haven’t done much ahead of time yet this year, so we will probably have an even simpler and more scaled-back holiday than usual. And I’m looking forward to it.
(I originally posted this a couple of years ago in my old version of the Jewelry Business Blog, and I thought this was a good time of year to bring it back out!)
