5 Quick Ways to Get Your Home Holiday Ready

When the holidays are looming large, the task of transforming your home into a festive grotto can feel overwhelming if you don’t have a plan of action or a lot of time to spare.

Then there are all of the other responsibilities that crop up at this time of year, from feeding and watering friends and family members to making sure you have space to host everyone.

Luckily there are a number of fast yet effective ways to add some seasonal magic to any domestic space and deal with daunting chores with time to spare, so here are just a few tips to try yourself.

Let the candles shine bright

Candles add a warm, welcoming light to any space in your home, and they are especially well suited to the holidays, as well as being a useful year-round investment.

With the help of Diptyque luxury candles, you can avoid the potentially tacky and less sustainable alternative of LED light strings, while also enjoying the exceptional range of scents available. You can also go the more affordable route, adding tea lights to old glass jars to give a rustic, authentic feel.

Always remember to follow safety guidelines when lighting candles in your home. And of course don’t combine candles with any flammable festive decorations, or else disaster is inevitable.

Prepare meals in advance

As the major events of the holidays approach, it can feel like you are in a mad rush to try and tick everything off the list when making big meals for your loved ones. The answer is to do as much prior preparation as possible, and make liberal use of your freezer whenever possible.

For example, if you are planning a soup starter, you can make this weeks in advance and put it in a suitable container to freeze until the big day arrives. The same goes for a variety of vegetable dishes and sides.

Use Christmas cards as decorations

If you feel like your walls are looking a little bare but you don’t want to go out of your way to buy yet more decorations to fill them, the festive missives you receive from the people in your life are the ideal option for adding a seasonal flourish.

You can go about this in a few ways, such as by tacking the cards to a ribbon and stringing them down the back of a door, or simply by adding them to every available surface as freestanding decorations. Then when the holiday season is over, you can easily recycle these cards to improve the sustainability of your celebrations.

Don’t delay on cleaning & tidying

The holidays can be chaotic, and it is easy to brush seemingly small domestic duties to one side when you have a lot going on. However, this can turn tiny tasks into much larger jobs if left to fester, so where possible aim to do lots of short sessions of cleaning and tidying, and prioritize individual jobs rather than whole rooms.

Also remember to get other members of the household involved, and not to try and do everything yourself. Delegating tasks is as much a part of holiday preparations as anything else, and will free up your time for other responsibilities.

A wreath does the work of a whole outdoor light display

For people with the time and the budget, going all-in on a light display to illuminate the outside of their homes on the holidays is an option. But for the rest of us, this can be too much of a challenge, and simply be excessively expensive.

A classic wreath, perhaps lit with solar powered LEDs, and affixed to your front door, is all you need to show the world that you are embracing the festive spirit, without spending a fortune.