Martha Stewart's Party Planning Checklist

You may recall my cleaning checklist from this post.  I love lists!  They make what may seem like overwhelming tasks or projects seem completely conquerable.  Well, in the spirit of the holiday party season, I wanted to share this Party Planning Checklist from Martha Stewart's website.  Rather than reinventing the wheel with creating my own Party Planning Checklist, I thought I would share her checklist with you:

http://images.marthastewart.com/images/content/web/pdfs/2009Q3/ms_checklist_partyplan.pdf

I think just about all the tasks on this checklist are spot on.  We're talking about Martha Stewart after all, so that's certainly not surprising.  In fact, in my opinion, you are way ahead of the game if you have accomplished all those items a week before the party.  And lets be honest, if you've got this much done 1 week before your party, the final 4 days are going to be SO MUCH LESS stressful...which is what we all want to accomplish when hosting a party.

On that note, this has also inspired a post that I'm going to have Nate write about because the only thing I'm questioning about this list is the cooking schedule.  And since Nate runs the cooking in our household, this is the perfect post for him.  I know Martha's suggesting that you can freeze the majority of your dishes weeks before the event, and then defrost them the day before but that seems like it would take away from the freshness of your meal as well as cause some freezer challenges for most of us.  So keep your eyes out for a post about the pros and cons of cooking weeks before your party and defrosting the meals.  In the meantime, hope this checklist is helpful for your holiday parties.