How to let your house manager make the holidays joyful, not stressful
With Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and other seasonal celebrations coming up, we’ve all got a flurry of travel, responsibilities and ultimately an overload of mental load. Here are a few ways our virtual house managers are uniquely positioned to relieve your mental load and help you navigate this season smoothly.
Holiday Cards
Every year I love getting holiday cards but truly dread making them ourselves. Why is that? It seems like such a hassle to book a photographer, pick a photo, compile addresses, design the cards and get them shipped. It can be a drag at best and an administrative nightmare atworst.
To address this very real pain, we’ve designed our customizable holiday card tracker that allows you to store names and addresses outside of a card ordering platform so you can shop discounts between Shutterfly and Vistaprint without being beholden to one because they have all your addresses. A quick upload and voila!
If you have a house manager on your team, they can book that photographer, get it on your shared family calendar, suggest and order coordinated family outfits, suggest the top 3 best images, layout the card, update the addresses of friends and family (they can even reach out for you to get updated addresses!), upload, and order. This means the only things you absolutely have to do is show up to the photoshoot and approve the final photo.
2. Gift Tracker
This is my personal favorite tool we’ve developed - our signature gift tracker that allows you to track every loved one’s important dates (birthdays, anniversaries etc), note how you know them (friend, family, colleague, client etc), reference what you bought them last year to avoid a rebuy, and automatically tally total costs against your annual gift budget so you know how much you planned to spend and how close you are to that maximum.
If gift giving isn’t your preferred love language or if you feel like you need help tracking, ordering and generating gift ideas, your dedicated house manager can help you look like the best mom, daughter-in-law, colleague and neighbor. Just nod and smile when they say “I don’t know how you do it all!”
3. Party Planning
I love to host but without a plan in place, it can quickly feel overwhelming. I’m hosting family from out of town for Thanksgiving as well as organizing our annual Friendsgiving event with nearly 75 people in attendance, and that’s on top of our annual Christmas Eve gathering and New Year’s Day beach playdate.
Thanks to my house manager’s forethought and planning, she laid out a project plan with each task we need to do to get organized for each gathering so it is assigned to me or my husband (sharing mental load!), has a deadline, and helps us work as a team to make these events successful. I actually bought disposable spoons today because my house manager tasked me with checking our cutlery inventory and even bugged me to make sure I’d actually done it before the deadline passed, knowing I would be stressed until I took the 5 minutes to do it.
4. Host Prep
To avoid your husband cleaning out the junk 20 minutes before a party starts, work with a house manager to plan out the house projects you need to get done in advance of the party so you don’t feel behind or at the mercy of a contractor’s inevitable delay.
5. Travel Planning & Booking
Travel can be particularly stressful around the holidays with packed airports and price jumps for rental cars, flights and hotels. A dedicated house manager can map out a mini project plan for logistics well enough in advance to take advantage of discounts and avoid last minute fares or 4 a.m. flights. Wouldn’t it be nice to just show up to the airport with a suitcase and everything booked for you?
6. Year End Financial Preparations
Say it with me - “this will be the year I file my taxes on time.”
This was my New Year’s Resolution last year and I’m actually very proud of myself to say I did it! And of course it was thanks to my house manager for generating a list of all the contributions I had to make before year end, forms to pull, donations to make, and setting up a folder to house all the documents before sending them to my CPA.
These are just a couple of ways our trusted house managers can support you and your family in this busy season, but of course there are a million more ways we can manage your mental load, set up systems that help your family thrive, and ultimately give you your time and sanity back.
Happy holiday-ing!
