When to Start Decorating: My 6-Week Christmas Timeline

Two Christmases ago I ordered a personalized stocking for my daughter on December 3rd, felt very proud of myself for being on top of it, and then watched the tracking sit at “in production” until December 27th. Two days after Christmas. She had a plain red stocking that year and honestly she didn’t care even a little, but I did! I stared at that gap on the stair rail every single day.

That’s the year I stopped thinking about decorating as “sometime after Thanksgiving” and started working backward from tree day instead. Because here’s the thing I had backwards for years: the tree isn’t the first thing. The tree is the last thing. Everything else has to already be done for tree day to feel like tree day.

So this is my six-week timeline. Tree day for me is the weekend after Thanksgiving, which means week one lands in the middle of October. If your tree goes up earlier (no judgment, I would put mine up in September if my husband would let me), just slide the whole thing back.

1. Six weeks out: order anything with a name on it

This is the entire reason the timeline exists. Personalized stockings, name ornaments, monogrammed tree skirts, custom family ornaments with the year on them — all of that is made to order by a person, and that person’s queue in December is not remotely the same as their queue in October!

I buy almost all of mine from small Etsy shops, so I don’t have one link to give you. What I do instead is check the shop’s current processing time (it’s right there under the shipping section) and add two weeks to whatever it says. If the shop says 3-5 business days in October, that same shop is quoting three weeks by Thanksgiving. Order in October and you get the October number!

While you’re in there, order the one you’re going to need next year too — a new baby, a new pet, a new last name. I know that sounds insane in October. It is so much less insane than December 3rd!

2. Five weeks out: open the bins before you need them

Not to decorate. Just to look!

I pull every Christmas bin into the living room and open them, and every single year I find something I didn’t remember owning and something I thought I owned and don’t! Last year it was 40 feet of garland I forgot about (great!) and zero working strands of warm white mini lights (not great — the entire box had gone out in storage).

Finding that out in late October means I order lights and they arrive quietly in the mail, in October, for October prices! Finding it out on tree day means I’m at Target at 8pm on a school night, buying whatever’s left!

This is also the year to fix the labeling if last January’s you was in a hurry. I finally gave in and got a label maker — nothing fancy, it’s the little Brother P-touch — and labeled every bin by room, not by category. “Living room,” “front porch,” “her room.” Category labels sound organized and then you’re opening four bins looking for one wreath. Room labels mean you carry one bin to one place and unpack the whole thing!

If your bins are the mismatched ones with the cracked lids (mine were), the clear latching bins are worth it just for being able to see in. And for the breakable ornaments, I use an ornament box with the lift-out trays so I’m not digging through tissue paper, plus a hard wreath case because I lost a wreath to a stacked bin once and I’m still a little bitter. I went through all of my storage picks in this post if you want the full list.

3. Four weeks out: hang the outdoor lights while it’s still nice out

This is my favorite trick in the whole timeline and it’s the one people push back on most.

Hang the lights in early November. Don’t turn them on. That’s it, that’s the trick!

When we lived in Tennessee, November went from sweater weather to genuinely cold in about ten days, and every year I ended up on a ladder in the dark with numb fingers trying to get a clip to stick. (Adhesive clips do not want to stick to a cold, damp surface. I found that out with numb fingers.) Here in Florida the problem is different — it’s that it’s still 85 degrees and I would rather do anything at 5pm than stand on hot pavement. Either way, the answer is the same: pick the nicest afternoon on the calendar, put them up then, and leave them dark until after Thanksgiving.

What I use: Command outdoor light clips for anything smooth like trim and door frames, and gutter hooks for the roofline. The gutter hooks come 200 to a pack, which sounds like way too many until you’re spacing them every six inches! Then I plug the whole thing into a Kasa outdoor smart plug so I never touch the cords again — the lights come on at dusk and go off at 10 without me thinking about it once. (This is also how I avoid the argument about who’s going out in the rain to unplug them.)

If you’re renting or you can’t put anything on your house, I wrote up every no-nail option I’ve tested in how to hang Christmas lights without nails.

4. Three weeks out: everything that isn’t the tree

Mid-November, and this is where I do all the decor that doesn’t announce itself as Christmas.

Garland on the mantel and the stair rail. Candles. Wooden beads. The neutral throw pillows. Anything in green, brass, cream or plaid. Walk through your house and put out every piece that a guest would just read as cozy rather than she has her tree up before Thanksgiving!

I also set up my cocoa bar this week, because the second the weather turns even slightly cool my daughter starts asking for cocoa, and it may as well be sitting out looking pretty. This is the week the house starts to smell like Christmas, and it’s completely stress-free because none of it is heavy or complicated.

Save the fresh greenery, though! Real cedar and balsam ordered now will be sad by December 20th — that comes later.

5. Two weeks out: Thanksgiving week, clear the corner

I do almost no decorating this week. On purpose!

What I do is move furniture. The tree corner is currently a chair, a floor lamp and a laundry basket that has lived there since August, and every year I forget that “putting up the tree” actually starts with 45 minutes of figuring out where the chair goes. So the week of Thanksgiving, I move the chair, run the vacuum where it used to be, and set the tree bin and the stand right there in the empty corner.

Then I fluff the tree. Yes, before the day. If it’s a fake tree it needs it, and fluffing takes way longer than anybody remembers (here’s my method — it took me a couple of years to stop dreading it). An assembled, fluffed, unlit tree standing in the corner on Thanksgiving night is the most hopeful thing in the world, y’all.

6. Tree day: the weekend after Thanksgiving

Because of everything above, this day gets to be the fun part instead of the hard part.

The tree is already fluffed and standing. The house is already decorated around it. The outdoor lights are already hung and just need to be switched on. All that’s left is lights, ribbon, ornaments, the stockings (the personalized ones, which arrived in early November and have been sitting in a bag since), and the tree skirt.

We put on music, I let my daughter hang the bottom two feet however she wants, and I have finally stopped rearranging them after she goes to bed (here’s what changed my mind). That’s the whole day. It takes an afternoon, not a weekend, and nothing is on fire!

7. The week where there’s nothing left to do

This is the part I didn’t expect when I first started planning this way — the first week of December, everything is done, and I have no idea what to do with myself!

So here’s what that week is for now. This is when I order the fresh greenery, so it’s at its best through Christmas. This is when I actually wrap gifts instead of doing it at 11pm on the 23rd. This is when we drive around and look at other people’s lights with cocoa in the car, which has quietly become the thing my daughter looks forward to most.

And it’s when I write next year’s notes. I keep a simple holiday planner (mine is a printable binder I made myself — a page for gifts, a page for what I need to replace, a page for the light count on each window), and while it’s all fresh I write down what I ran out of, which strand died, what I want more of. Next October, past me hands present me a list. It’s the single most useful decorating habit I have and it takes fifteen minutes!

That’s the whole thing. Six weeks, most of them fifteen-minute weeks, and then one really good afternoon.

If you’re building your own timeline this year, post it on instagram and tag me @sugardesignco — I want to see what tree day looks like at your house!

-Ciera

Made something with this? Tag me @sugardesignco — I love seeing them.