How To Create a Christmas Menus Recipe Planner

Are you Holiday ready?
Let’s talk about how to create a Christmas Menus Recipe Planner.
Preparing ahead for meals and grocery shopping is a life saver.

And leaves time for the cooks to enjoy family time.

Unless your family time includes cooking together.

At our Christmas celebrations we like to enjoy the outdoors, play games and cozy up with a cup of something and chat.

Cooking the meals is not considered part of the celebration.

So this Christmas Menu and Recipe Planner is our answer to being Holiday ready.

How to Get Holiday Ready

1. Create a Christmas Menus Recipe Planner Now

Take a few hours now to plan the meals you’ll all have together to save a bunch of stress later on.

Our family loves to have a say in the planning, and I’m so good with that.

I plan to email my Menu Planner to each of them for ideas for the meals.

They’ll volunteer which meals they want to help with, and send me an ingredient list.

And/or the recipes, so I can purchase the groceries that can be stored ahead of time.

2. Organize all the Christmas Menus Recipes into an Album

Purchase a mini binder and name it your Christmas Planner. We have digital designs in our Christmas Shop to create your binder. You can personalize your binder covers. And print matching recipe pages to fill in the old fashioned way, or upload to a PDF app and type your recipes.

Next Christmas you will thank yourself for doing the work now!

3. Create a Master Ingredient List

Go through the recipes and write down all the ingredients.

Then create a master list adding all the amounts together for each item.

Don’t be me, and think you’ll have some of the stuff on hand, and then when cooking time comes, there’s not enough.

Check your pantry to make sure you have the ingredients and enough of them.

4. Organize a Master Shopping List

Separate your shopping list into items to purchase ahead,

and the groceries you’ll have to buy at the last minute.

Last Christmas I didn’t have the time to organize, and it wasn’t pretty.

Well, part of the problem was having our Christmas celebration at Spring Break.

Because if we waited we could meet our new g’little!

But that put my planning out of kilter and gave us less time to just chill.

5. Prep as much food as you can ahead of time.

Create a list of the foods you can prepare ahead and keep in the freezer or fridge.

Then plan your calendar for the time to prepare those foods.

I’m embarrassed to show you my filled calendar, but here’s an image of the form that comes with our Christmas Menu Planners…

Do you use a Christmas Menus Recipe Planner?

How do you get Holiday ready?

We’d love to hear your ideas and fail-safe methods!

And if you want to refer back to this post, pin this image to your Christmas planning board: