Family coming?
It’s the pressure that we all can feel as November comes around and December approaches. The pressure for that quintessential perfect Christmas is one that can suck us all in and cleaning can help give us back a little bit of control.
For sanity’s sake, you may try and rope in some of your own family to help. If you do, explain why first. It’s no good telling them on the hoof. If they’re not mentally prepared, you’ll spend the whole time yelling at your teenagers to come out of their rooms, rather than getting them on with hoovering the floor or fluffing cushions for you to make the living room look splendid.
1. Enlist your own family
Just because they’ve been mentally prepared, doesn’t mean your kids (or your partner) will join in cheerfully with a list of chores as long as your arm. A list IS a good idea. This way you can break down the jobs into manageable tasks that even your nine-year-old can do without breaking a sweat.
Rewards are important. Breaks are good. So by all means, make promises of treats (we’ll break open the stashed Heroes while we go) or TV shows (we’ll watch your favourite episode of Brooklyn 99 when we’re done), which can all help to shape cleaning day into something you all look back on if not fondly, with some wry smiles.
2. Get organised early
In the same way you let us organise your Bin Cleaning schedule, if you can organise a house cleaning schedule that involves the whole family without too much stress, you’re going to have a happier and healthier time overall.
So start early. Be kind to yourself. Don’t start the Christmas cleaning two days before family arrive. Start at the beginning of December. Make a list of extra cleaning tasks you want to do. It might be you want to clean all your windows – so make a list of how many and a day to do each. Breaking it down makes it manageable and helps ease the pressure on you. If you want to do extra hoovering, again list what, where and when. And share this list with your family. Anyone can hoover, it’s not difficult and yes, you might have to do it again – but you were anyway, weren’t you? So teaching your children or teens how to hoover will reap its own rewards. And teach quick fixes. Throws and cushions on sofas, straightened and fluffed up, can make a room suddenly look smarter than it did five minutes before.
3. Break down the tasks
Bathroom cleaning should be done more frequently if you want to avoid stress. But by more frequently, we don’t mean the whole thing more, just do the bits that need an extra clean more. So perhaps clean the floor more often or wipe down the skirting boards more than you usually do. Those extras can add to the shiny feel and great smell of the bathroom. It also means you’ll know it’s as clean as can be when family arrive and you’re doing that last minute blitz – because the real blitzing will already have been done.
4. Clean As You Go
Finally, try and clean as you go so that rooms don’t get messier and messier so you have to have a massive last minute cleaning frenzy. There’ll always be last minute jobs, but by cleaning as you go, and doing a few extra cleans as we’ve advised, you’ll be better prepared and less frazzled when the family all descend. And the good news is, once they’ve spent a few hours with you, you can make sure they help with the cleaning and tidying up too! Have a few tasks for everyone to do on Christmas Eve or Christmas Night/Boxing Day morning – like prepping veggies, taking children out to the local church service, or setting the table for you in advance.
Christmas Day
Put someone in charge of discarded wrapping paper and a couple of people in charge of loading or unloading the dishwasher. Appoint someone else to be responsible for rounding up empty cups and glasses. And squirt bleach down the loos every time you use them, you’ll be glad you did.
Then after dinner you can sit down and watch one your preferred speeches of the day, either HM King Charles III’s first speech or an alternative from Channel 4. Whatever you do, make sure it’s not you clearing the tables, and it is you sat in front of the telly with the remote control and your favourite glass of something refreshing, so that you can say you’ve definitely had a very Merry Christmas!
