Thanksgiving is great fun for friends and family, but what does it mean for the host or hostess? Stress, stress, stress. Stress over the amount of money you spent on food, stress over hoping everything gets done on time, stress over having 80 million kids running around pulling the dog’s tail and drunk Aunt Ethel tossing you backhanded compliments on your cooking all night. To put it simply- it’s responsibility over load.
How do you battle it? Delegate, delegate, delegate. The perfect Thanksgiving (if such a thing exists) isn’t solely your responsibility. Enlist the help of your family to ease the load.
Make sure everyone knows it’s BYOD
- bring your one dish.
No one enters the front door unless they bring a dish. No wimpy cheese balls and a box of Triscuits, either. Assign real dishes to your guests: green bean casseroles, salads, sweet potatoes, rolls. Every one can bring everything right up to the point of cooking, so all you have to do is pop everything in the oven or on the stove, and the only thing you have to worry about is the turkey. You’ll save a fortune on food supplies, and save tons of time so that you can, oh, I don’t know, enjoy yourself.
Put your kids in charge of decorating.
Don’t buy decorations you are only going to use once and throw out, and don’t buy decorations you tell yourself are worth the price tag because you will use them every year. You are going to spill wine and slop gravy on the fancy table cloth, so save your money. Get the kids out of your hair for a while, and set them off to make decorations. They’ll have a blast making paper turkeys or Autumn wreaths, and hanging them all over the house, and you’ll think something’s wrong because they are so eerily quite. They will also keep your relatives busy eagerly pulling them all over the house to show them their handy work. You? You get to breathe.
Just buy your pies.
No one expects you to be Martha Stewart and whip up 5 pies from scratch. No one can taste them by the end of the meal, anyway, because they are so stuffed with food so home baked isn’t necessary. Save time and money and just hit the grocery store.
Don’t supply the alcohol.
If people wanna drink, they have to bring it themselves. Alcohol is expensive, and you don’t want to have to make an extra trip to the liquor store to pick up your spirits. You’ll save some serious dough, and perhaps that saved trip will save you from hiding a bottle in the pantry to help deal with the madness.
Make someone else do the dishes.
You cooked? They clean. You decide who they is: hubby, wife, kids, Grandma. This is a family holiday, and you should be able to enjoy some of it. Your family doesn’t expect you to do everything, so when they offer to help, let them. Don’t shoo them away, because if they are anything like me, they will only offer once.
Give up some control. Hand over the reigns. Don’t complain about the stress of the holidays when you can easily eliminate a lot of it. Most importantly, don’t forget to have fun!
(Dishes Photo By Rubergloverlover)
