The Lazy Genius Podcast - #184 - Find Your Holiday Decorating Personality

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

It’s the middle of November, and some of you might have already gone through the process of decorating or you’re putting it off because it’s overwhelming or you always do the weekend after Thanksgiving which is coming up, but the point is it’s kind of time. And it can be very overwhelming. Today, I want to give you a lens through which to view your decorating so you can find your holiday decorating personality and then offer five steps on getting yourself prepared to actually do it. Stuff Mentioned Grab a copy of Myquillyn’s latest book Welcome Home: A Cozy Minimalist Guide to Decorating and Hosting All Year Round (pro tip: stock up when it goes on sale and use them as teacher gifts!) A few Lazy Genius holiday greatest hits episodes: Ten Ideas for a Holiday Reset, Nailing Your Holiday Vibe, The Lazy Genius Guide to Flexibility, Refocus Your Christmas Brain How to Decorate for the Holidays Without Punching Someone in the Face Download a transcript of this episode This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 184. Find Your Holiday Decorating Personality. It's the middle of November, and some of you might have already gone through the process of decorating or you're putting it off because it's overwhelming. Or maybe you already know when you're going to do it. You always do it the weekend after Thanksgiving, which is coming up. which is crazy. But the point is it's kind of time to start thinking about it if holiday decorating matters to you. And it can be overwhelming. So today I want to give you a lens through which to view your decorating so you can find your holiday decorating personality. And then I'm going to offer five steps on getting yourself prepared to actually do it. We want fun, not frustration. So let's jump in. All right. Before we start, we have to name what matters. Right? Always. Every process around here begins with naming what matters because it's that important. If we don't name what matters, we can lose sight of why we're doing something or who we're doing it

for. We can burn out and get grumpy or lose interest and why we were doing the things in the first place, which it just doesn't sound like the kind of holiday festive merriment that we're going for here in the first place. So name what matters. as you consider that, as you consider what matters to you at Christmas or maybe just what matters in this particular kind of like winter holiday season, I want you to think about what kind of kind of decorating makes the most sense for you. Okay. For you, your family, whoever you share

your home with, if other people have opinions, you might want to ask them. But I think that there are three main types of techniques or kind of personalities. When it's, comes to actually putting decorations up. Clearing the decks, leading with your senses, and going slow. Clear the decks decorators like to get everything out and up in record time, you know, for maximum holiday enjoyment. It's kind of like those Instagram reels where you snap and then whatever's in front of the camera is magically transformed, you know? That's kind of what this is. It's like efficient and fun. It's sometimes chaotic. But the point is to get the decorations up so that you can focus on the holiday movies and the cocoa and whatever else matters.

Like it's up and it's done and you don't have to think about it anymore. That's a clear-the-dex decorator. Lead with your senses, decorators. Think of the whole vibe of a room as decorating. The Christmas music playing in the background and the candles burning around the room. Those are just as much as part of the holiday decorations as like Christmas lights and stockings. my friend Michael and Smith, otherwise known as the nester, she is a prime example of a lead with your senses decorator and she wrote a whole book about it. It came out this year. I love it so much.

It's called Welcome Home, a cozy minimalist guide to decorating and hosting all year round. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And last but not least, we have the go slow decorators who see decorating as another way to prepare themselves and their families for the season, kind of like an Advent calendar and the season of Advent itself, it kind of marks the days leading up to Christmas on purpose. Go slow decorators, view the process as the point. That's the journey. It's not really so much the destination of having everything fully decorated. Okay, so now that we've identified those three kind of personality types of decorators, think about which one you are, which one kind of resonates with you. And if a couple do, pick the one that

sort of feels like it's the strongest just to give you a lens to look through these next five steps. So we're going to run through them now. All right. So step number one, pick a day and or a rhythm that makes sense for you to get this done. There is zero joy in trying to cram your holiday decorating into pockets of time between Zoom meetings and grocery pickup. When you cram holiday tasks into the margins of your day, which likely is not your goal, like and that can happen if you're not intentional about it if you're not intentional about how you spend your time you're not going to enjoy the process at all right you need to be purposeful so step number one is to pick a day when you have you know you're going to have energy to tackle what you're doing

so if you're a like clear the decks kind of decorator you want a whole afternoon maybe a whole day or whole weekend if it's like real intense not intense that sounds bad if it's like a lot you know if you've got a lot of stuff, a lot of rooms, if you want to spread holiday cheer through your entire house, you need to choose a time that can accommodate that. If you are a senses decorator, maybe a rhythm works better for you of where to start, like you start with smells and lighting first before you even think about a tree or any actual winter or Christmas decor, right? For go slow decorators, you will probably want, you know, maybe some time to kind of a and sort of plan how you add things and have a rhythm to implement it. So maybe you pick a day,

like one day a week where you add one or two more things, like one evening a week or something. You pick Tuesday. That's your add more holiday cheer decorating day. So that's step number one. Pick a day or a rhythm that makes sense for you. Step number two, tidy the areas. Don't run away at the we're tidy. Tidy the areas in your home that will feature decorations or that are going to be changed in some way. Now, when I say tidy, all right, you can, this can be like full on go clean co, deep clean with your, your corox and your bleach and your water if you want it to be. But it can also be as simple as just like dusting off your mantle and putting away like the fragments of your his Halloween costume that's still in your entryway from like several weeks ago.

If you have been around here for a while, you know that I like to think about morning routines. Let's pivot real quick to routines. Routines for me, a morning routine especially is like kindly opening the day by gradually increasing my productive energy. It's not just like all or nothing. It's not, you know, being in a plane and then jumping out of a plane. It's kind of a slow progression. The same concept applies here. By tidying up. beforehand kind of slowly you can better see where your holiday decorations actually are going to go or where you're going to switch things up um it's just it's kind of a slow process by tidying it's got to it's got to happen or it's not going to be fun to put your holiday stuff up because you're like oh this is so dirty

and gross or i don't need this anymore where i'm going to put it and then you have a pile of items of discarded things from various surfaces that you haven't actually removed and then they just sort of clutter your house. So that's step two. Go ahead and tidy a little bit. You know, just clear a few surfaces, dust off a couple things. Just clear your decks a bit before you lug out the bins of decor. And that applies no matter your decorating style. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw. A special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life.

You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right. Step number three. Remember your decoration limitations. In our, you know, our Instagram comparison world, it's easy to not know when to stop with the trees and the lights and the ornaments and the elves and all the things. we can easily get caught up in that more, more, more way of living. And before we know it, we're staring at an enormous inflatable reindeer to put on the roof when we don't really care about reindeer or roof decorations.

So remember you're decorating limitations and maybe even create some. Okay. So maybe you choose a color palette that works for your everyday home, but just adds like a little extra pop of color or sparkle. That could be a good limitation. for you. Maybe you have a limitation of like nothing on the roof. Maybe you want to choose snowflakes instead of Santa to get more mileage out of your decor. If you are a go slow decorator, one limitation could be to only use things that are high impact. You know, you don't need to do a lot because you

don't want to really. You kind of want to go slow. But what you will do, it's going to make a big statement. If you're a census decorator, maybe a limitation for you is to only buy a, decorations that you can use all the way through February. And if you like to clear the decks, a good starter limit could be decorating no more than one room at a time or maybe setting a budget for yourself because you you really like to go hard on the decorating. So that's number three. Step number four, pull out all of your decorations and assess them. All right. So whether your decorations are like if they're carefully packed away in color coordinated boxes or they are, in the attic where you like stress toss them up there at the end of last year, you need to pull them

out to see what you're working with. I have a big old dining room table. I love to lay everything out so I can sort of group things together by room or style or purpose or it helps me to see what I have. It helps me remember like sweet things that I want to remember that might have gotten lost in the box. And it also helps me remove anything that just doesn't fit my style or our family's priorities anymore. So over the years, I have found this step as like a, it's like a prime example of the lazy genius principle of going in the right order, okay? Because you remember what matters. That's the first part of going in the right order. And then you calm the crazy. Calm in the crazy sort of keeps, by putting everything out, it calms the crazy of wondering what you have. And like, did you forget

this thing? And maybe you should go buy other stuff because you don't actually know what you have. like it's just a really, really lovely thing to do. It helps you see what you have so that you're not pulling things randomly out of their box and then unwrapping them out of their tissue paper and then you put it somewhere. You know what you have first. It's kind of like in this, it's helpful to see everything before you make moves and that is kind of like zones that we use in the kitchen. We've talked about that before. There's actually an IGTV video of that on my Instagram account at The Lazy Genius about the Power of Zones. But if you start, here's the example, if you start loading the dishwasher before all of the

dirty dishes are in what I call the dirty dishes zone and they're right in front of you and you see everything you're working with, you will have to move stuff around in your dishwasher because you're going to load this plate, but then you forgot you had this pot and then you put all the bowls on the bottom. But really you need to put the pot on the bottom and so you need to put the bowls at the top and the little bit. The same concept applies here is that you need to just. just see everything that you have. It really, really helps. And then you can decorate the way that you

want to. That's true for all three decorating personalities. And finally, step number five, decorate and then enjoy it, whatever that means for you. So maybe you like to put on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I wonder if we're going to have a parade this year. But maybe you like to put that on as you trim your tree. Maybe you would rather wait until your house, is free of the tiny humans. Maybe you want to do it by yourself. For a time, I like to take all of my decor down, even like art and photos off the walls. Like Michael and the Nestor calls this quiet in your space. I would like remove everything. Books off the shelves, everything. And then I would add it back with my Christmas decor mixed in. So it made our ordinary everyday home feel a little bit more magical

and I got rid of the things that didn't matter as much. But now I don't do that because it takes a little bit more time than I want. And I like to add in seasonal touches like candles that smell like pine trees and pull out all the cozy blankets and just kind of call it a day. Even before we put up, our tree, it's like really, really minimal. I am definitely leaning into my leading with my senses style of decorating. But by naming that and decorating that way without feeling weird about it, I get to enjoy it even more, right? The goal here is to have a home that, feels welcoming to the people who live in it, whatever that means to you. It is to have a room that feels like the holidays in the way that you want them to, but the process with which to get there

also feels like the way you want the holidays to feel to you. You don't have to have a finished room. You don't have to have a magazine worthy tree. You can if that matters, right? If it matters to you to have an amazingly like beautiful opulent tree, do your thing. But you don't have to impress people. That's usually, that usually ends in catastrophe anyway when our ultimate goal is to be impressive. So just decorate and enjoy it. Whatever that means for you. Decorate until it's not fun anymore. And then take a break and try again the next day. And if it's still not fun, then guess what? You're done. Decorating over. How exciting. Congratulations. So those are the five steps. I hope that you have found those five steps helpful for your holiday decorating and that

naming your decorating personality, it might give you permission to move forward in the way that makes the most sense for you. If you want more lazy genius holiday ideas, there are lots of episodes in the archives and some blog post too. I will link to those things in the show notes, but you can also, a really easy way for you to kind of scroll things to is to go to the lazy genius collective.com and then just search in the search box or whatever, the word holiday. There are tons of things that you can find. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm so grateful for you for your time listening and for sharing this episode, it means the world.

And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch.

I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.