Welcome to the Houseworks Holiday Plan!

Christmas is coming, and you're dreaming of a clean and organized home, all decked out in holiday glory.

Then you open your eyes to reality. Looking around the house, it's hard to imagine how to cut the clutter, manage fall cleaning and prepare for Christmas all at once.

How will you bring the current state of domestic chaos into holiday readiness: clean, organized, prepared?

Try the Houseworks Holiday Plan and make your house work ... for the holidays!

Part book group, part organizing schedule, the Houseworks Holiday Plan is an 18-week holiday plan designed to help you clean and organize your home in time for the holiday season--and take care of seasonal preparations, too.

Beginning at the end of August, the Houseworks Holiday Plan breaks decluttering, cleaning and Christmas organizing chores down into small, weekly bites.

Each week, the plan assigns a cleaning-and-organizing focus based on the book Houseworks, along with a short list of holiday planning chores to chill out seasonal stress before it begins.

You'll learn to STOP clutter, clean and organize each room in your home. At the same time, you'll tackle a few holiday preparations each week. The goal: to bring house and home into readiness for the holiday season.

Houseworks Weekly Focus
Each week, the Plan applies four Houseworks skill sets--declutter, organize, clean and plan--to a single room or area.  Area by area, you'll cut clutter, organize, and deep-clean in good time to have a clean house for the holidays.

There's a seasonal logic to the Weekly Focus assignments. Early on, the Plan organizes personal spaces, to make it easier to plan the season, craft gifts and decor, and carry out wrapping and Christmas card chores.

As Thanksgiving Day appears on the horizon, food preparation and storage areas take center stage to speed menu planning, holiday meals and baking.

By December, the focus moves to public spaces and final cleaning, leaving the house clean, organized and ready for the celebration. After the holiday, the Plan's final week sees you into an organized New Year, debriefing, storing decorations, and getting a good start on the next year's celebration.

Holiday Prep Assignments
Along with an area-by-area Houseworks focus, each week includes a planning assignment for holiday prep: a list of do-it-now jobs designed to make short work of preparing for the holidays.

From gifts to decor, cooking to clothes, holiday prep assignments take the big chores and breaks them down into easy-to-manage steps. Doing a few holiday prep tasks each week, you'll be organized for a calm and stress-free Christmas season.

Free Printable Planner Forms

The secret to an organized holiday season? A Christmas notebook to track and record all the little things that make the celebration special. As the plan progresses, we'll add holiday planner forms, calendars, gift lists and menu planners to our notebook--and to make it easy, they're free for the printing in the Forms Library!

• Printable Christmas Planner Pages