Digital Planning and the Holidays

Welcome back to the blog. This week we are going to be discussing Digital Planning and the holidays. We personally love the holidays so we find great enjoyment in incorporating the holidays into our digital planner. This blog post will talk about why it can be a fun aspect to include in your digital planner, different ways you can go about making your digital planner a bit more holiday-ee, and how you can use the holidays to tap into your creativity. Hope you enjoy it!

So why would you ever want to include the holidays in your digital planner or use it as a base for your digital planner practice? There are a couple of reasons why we like to do it, but the main reason is because it’s FUN! It changes up the practice a bit. It allows you to be in the holiday spirit and it can even provide you an opportunity to dive deeper into what the holiday means to you. Lastly, it allows you to show your creativity and really claim the holiday in a way that matches how you view it.

Now if those are enough reasons for you (they’re definitely enough reasons for us 😀) we’ll get into different ways you can incorporate the holidays into your digital planner.

The first thing we like to do is to take some time to free-write about the holiday. This doesn’t have to be a long process. But we do like to take some time to identify our feelings on the holiday and see what comes up for us.

These are the questions we use to guide us through this reflection:

What are the origins of this holiday?
How do I feel when celebrating this holiday?
Are there any colors or images that come to mind when I think of this holiday?
What are my favorite parts of this holiday? What are my least favorite parts about this holiday?
What am I looking forward to celebrating during this holiday?
How do I want to incorporate aspects of this holiday into my digital planner?

The time we spend on this portion depends on whether we are using the holiday as a base for our month, week, or day. Typically if we are using the holiday as a foundation for our month we’ll spend more time on this reflection exercise than we would if we were using the holiday to plan our day.

Once we’ve figured out what the holiday means to us, how we want to incorporate the holiday into our digital planner, and our general thoughts on the holiday; we will then move on to designing our digital planners with this holiday in mind.

We like to follow this 5-step process as it really keeps everything moving forward.

Identify the holidays you will be celebrating and add them to your calendar

Figure out which holidays are important to you and add the holidays that you celebrate or resonate with to your calendar. Truly only do the ones that you celebrate or have a connection with.

2. Make month, week, or day themes around that holiday

Decide if you want to use the holiday(s) in the month as a theme for either the whole month, the week that the holiday lands on, or the day that the holiday is on.

3. Use color palettes that remind you of the holiday

Pending on how you’ve decided to move forward with this holiday, we are now at the fun part: starting to use our creativity to enhance our digital planner.

We like to start out by choosing a color palette for the month/week/day that represents the holiday. Some color combinations for different holidays that we adore are:

Christmas - #25330F #B78C56 #741102
Dia de Los Muertos - #82218B #FFCF33 #FF6201
Hannukah - #44576D #E6E6E6 #AAC7D8
Lunar New Year - #CB904D #C20114 #87C38F
Valentines Day - #8B1E3F #D57B91 #E7D7C1

4. Add stickers or shapes that fit in with the holiday

Our next step would be to add stickers or shapes that fit in with the holiday. This step can be so fun. Feel free to source stickers from you favorite digital planner shop. (We actually supply free stickers every quarter so feel free to sign up to our newsletter so you have access to these).

Another way is to make stickers directly in your digital planner via doodles. A few easy doodles to do are:

Christmas - pine trees, garlands, holly, wrapped gifts, candy canes, mistletoe, etc.
Halloween - carved pumpkins, ghosts, candy corn, leaves, etc.
Lunar New Year - lanterns, tea pots, red envelopes, flowers, etc.

Some easy shape examples to include:

Christmas - triangles = trees, circles = ornaments, J shapes = candy canes, etc.
Hanukkah - rectangles = candles, square = dreidels, arc = menorah, ovels - latkes, etc.
Lunar New Year - S shape = dragon, hexagon = lanterns, rectangle = red envelopes, circles = mooncakes, etc.

5. Add photos from past years or the current one to commemorate the holiday

The last step and also our favorite, is to add photos from previous years or the current one to really personalize the spread. It’s super fun to add these photos in combination with doodles and stickers. The effect is always incredible!

There you have it! This is our exact method in how we use our digital planner and holidays. We hope you enjoyed this blog post and it sparked some creativity for you. If you end up using this as a guide for your digital planner feel free to tag us on instagram (@Oodles_of_Joy_Designs), we’d love to see what you create :)

Wishing you oodles of joy and happy planning!

Setting Up The Month in Your Digital Planner