The Card List
Most people keep their Christmas card list in their head, and most people quietly lose two or three names a year without ever noticing.
There are two columns for each year: S for the cards you sent, R for the ones you received. The received column is the one that earns its place. It catches the people who thought of you when you did not think of them, and after three years it shows you, without any guesswork, who has gently stopped.
Nobody is crossed off. There is a line at the bottom marked paused, so that if a card turns up from someone you had let go, they come straight back.
Three years to a sheet, so it gets more useful every time you fill it in.
The Gift List
One column does almost all the work here: what I gave last year.
It prevents the repeat, it stops the slow annual escalation that nobody ever decided on, and it means you start each autumn with information instead of a blank and faintly panicky page.
Fill the Ideas column across the year rather than in November. When somebody mentions something in April, write it down that day. The best presents are nearly always the ones you overheard months earlier.
Write the budget before you shop, not afterwards in a spirit of regret.
And there are two ticks at the end, bought and wrapped. The relief of the second one is out of all proportion to the effort involved.
From Keep the Christmas Magic, the chapter on presents.
The Menu
Every Christmas menu grows by roughly one dish a year, and it never shrinks, because no single addition ever feels like too much.
So this sheet asks for two things: what you served, and what happened to it. Finished. Half went back. Untouched. Made it and forgot to put it out.
That last verdict is more common than you would think, and it is always slightly heartbreaking, and it tells you a great deal about how much you were carrying that day.
Two or three dishes on your list will turn out to exist purely out of momentum. Cut them. Not one will be missed.
Then keep what survives. A menu that repeats is not a failure of imagination, it is a tradition, and children in particular are fierce about the food being the same.
From Keep the Christmas Magic, the chapter on food.
The September Audit
What actually happened last Christmas.
September is the right month for this. If it is already November, do it anyway. Because by December you will have forgotten last year and by January you will not want to think about it.
Christmas Notes
Here is a decorated page for your christmas notes. Print it out and use it as a message board on the kitchen sink or use it as shopping list for the december.
