10 Ways To Save Time Decorating This Holiday Season

The holidays are busy for everyone. Hosting holiday parties, family coming to stay, and decorating cookies are all on the docket.

With so many events taking place in the home, you want to make sure your house looks great for the holidays. At the same time, you don’t want to spend so much time decorating that it detracts from time with your family and friends.

In this article, we’ve laid out ten tips to help you save time decorating your home so you can spend time on the things that matter.

1. Use Multi-Seasonal or Holiday Decor

You’ll save tons of time if you group your decorations into seasons rather than holidays when you buy them. For example, Thanksgiving through Christmas can usually be grouped together thanks to in-season gourds, chrysanthemums, and greenery. Doing this allows you to make fewer decorative transitions. You can also do this for other times of year including spring/Easter and autumn/Halloween.

2. Just a Pop of Color

Decking the house out in green and red takes can be overwhelming.

Instead, try adding a few decorative pops of color to each room. You can use plants and flowers like branches of evergreen bushes or trees. Throw pillows are equally easy to change out each season. Go for a mix of solid and patterned pillows to add more dimension to your living spaces. These slight pops of color around your home will stand out more, especially in a neutrally-decorated room.

3. Transform Everyday Items

This is such an easy trick you can use for any time of year. The idea is to purchase decorative items for your home that work for any season that you can also alter slightly. For example, you might buy a decorative bowl for a coffee table that’s silver. Around Easter, you can fill it with decorated eggs and at Christmas, you can fill it with spare ornaments, pine cones, or candies.

4. Declutter as You Go

Call this deferred time-saving. While decluttering as you unpack decorations might slow you down this year, it’ll speed up your process for next year.

There are several areas you can focus on decluttering as you decorate your home and move through other holiday activities. Decorations are an easy place to start. A good general rule of thumb is if you don’t pull a decoration out of its storage box (and you haven’t in several years), it’s time to donate that item or throw it away.

5. Have Your Tree Delivered

This might seem like a cheat, but it’ll save you so much time. Having your tree delivered saves you from going to the lot, tying the tree down to your car, and shuffle it into your house.

Or, if you’ve been thinking about getting a reusable tree, a way to save time is to buy one that already has lights on it. This will save you the time and effort of needing to string lights on the tree.

6. Let Someone Else Wrap

Wrapping presents can take up a huge amount of time, especially if you have lots of people to give gifts to.

If you order gifts online, there are many online stores that will also gift wrap for you. Amazon is one such store that will do that for you. If you’re the kind of person who needs to go to physical stores, take advantage of gift wrapping services at each store or at the mall.

Another option is to find gift wrapping concierge services in the Boston area. All these options will save you considerable amounts of time even if it costs you a bit extra.

7. Dual-Purpose Tablescape

This year, instead of buying tablescape decorations, find small items from around your home to decorate the table with. A great way to do this is to find small dishes and bowls from around the house and fill them with candy. This way, guests can still munch on something sweet if you have long chats after a dinner party. Just buy individually-wrapped candy so you don’t need to worry about dust.

8. Focus on One Area

Instead of focusing on decorating your whole house, just decorate the areas your family and your guests will hang out in the most. You’ll save considerable amounts of time on just decorating one or two rooms.

For many, the room of choice will be the living/family room. It’s where many families will put their Christmas tree and celebrate Christmas morning. If you plan on having tons of holiday parties, you’ll likely want to expand your decorating efforts into the dining room.

9. Organize as You Disassemble Christmas

When the holidays are over, it’s tempting to chuck everything into a box and be done with it. Do yourself the favor and thoughtfully organize as you put decorations away.

Using clear, labeled bins, pack away items by room or by purpose. This will help you easily identify what’s in the bins when you go fish them out next year. Put all your tree decorations in one bin (and try wrapping Christmas lights around a piece of cardboard to keep them from tangling) and all your outdoor decorations in another. Essentially, organize in a way that makes sense to you.

10. Hire a Professional

One of the easiest ways to save time on decorating for the holidays is to hire a professional decorator and organizer. A professional decorator/organizer can artfully decorate your home and give you some tips on how to organize your decorations for the end of the season.

Save Time for the Important Things

Spending time with family and friends is the best part of the holiday season. Spend more time with them by saving time on decorating this year.

Hiring a professional is the easiest way to save time on decorating and bring you peace of mind. Ditch the Clutter provides a holiday decorating and organizing service and we’re taking clients now. Get in touch with us to schedule a decorating consultation!