Is Christmas at your house more manic than merry? Chill out and have the best holiday ever with help from our December 2000 issue story 101 Tips for a Stress-Free Christmas. Here is an excerpt to get you started.
Can you name one person who doesn't find writing and addressing Christmas cards a chore on par with filling out an income tax return? We can: Ann Douglas, a prolific book author and our “Smart Solutions” columnist, who mails out 150 cards every year. Here's her tried-and-true advice.
• Enter the addresses of everybody you're sending cards to (business and personal) into your home computer database (time-consuming now, but timesaving in the long run).
• To address cards, print addresses onto purchased sheets of peel-and-stick labels. (Ann uses the address-printing program that came with her Lotus Organizer.)
• Go ahead and write a form letter to keep loved ones up-to-date, but keep it light. “I don't bother with all that ‘Johnny's off to Harvard this year' stuff,” says Ann. “Mine's more of a reverse Christmas letter, a Hall of Shame in which I talk about the weird stuff, the almost-embarrassing things we've been up to.”
• Get your family together around a table (stacked with Christmas goodies as an incentive) for a card assembly line: one person stuffs, one sticks on the labels, one stamps, one seals, etc.
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