Curated by JLS

Hosting Back-to-Back Family Celebrations During a Busy Holiday Season

There’s a certain stretch of the year — usually starting in early November — where life quietly shifts into overdrive. The calendar fills, weekends disappear, and everything feels layered on top of everything else. It’s festive and joyful, yes, but it’s also full.

This year, that stretch felt especially intense for our family.

It started in early November and didn’t really let up until mid-January. One celebration rolled straight into the next, with very little pause in between. None of it felt optional — it was simply life happening all at once.

In the span of just a few weeks, we moved through my son’s third birthday, my own birthday shortly after, hosting Thanksgiving for about fifteen people, traveling to Florida for my husband’s work, an impromptu friends-and-family holiday dinner that somehow turned into fourteen people and homemade pasta, Christmas Eve at our house with around twenty people, a kid-friendly early “European-style” New Year’s Eve celebration, and finally my daughter’s first birthday with close to thirty people.

Seeing it all written out still makes me pause.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I realized something had to give — and it couldn’t be the joy.

I stopped trying to make every gathering feel special in the same way. Instead, I focused on letting each one be what it needed to be. Some moments were thoughtfully planned. Others were simple, casual, and imperfect — and just as meaningful.

By the time we reached January, I knew I didn’t want my daughter’s first birthday to feel like a grand finale that required more energy than we had left.

We chose a simple winter wonderland theme and planned a short window from 1–4 p.m., hoping to keep things manageable and calm. I leaned on décor and serving pieces I already had or could reuse, and food that didn’t require hours in the kitchen.

Of course, that’s not exactly how it played out.

Friends stayed. Kids kept playing. Someone suggested ordering subs, and suddenly the afternoon stretched into evening. We sat around talking, eating, and letting the day unfold naturally — no schedule, no rush, no pressure to wrap things up neatly.

And honestly, it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the day.

Looking back, this stretch of life reminded me that celebrating doesn’t have to mean doing more. Sometimes it means setting a gentle plan — and then allowing room for it to grow. Having a few go-to hosting pieces, easy crowd food options, and flexible expectations made it possible to enjoy the moments instead of managing them.

The best moments often aren’t the ones you carefully outline ahead of time. They’re the ones that happen when you stop watching the clock and just stay a little longer.

As we move into a new year, I’m carrying that with me — planning with intention, holding it lightly, and letting life fill in the rest.