Now that Labor Day has come and gone, the Elf Blog will go back to its regular schedule, striving for posts every weekday.

Speaking of scheduling, let's focus on how the upcoming months unfold.  Labor Day was at it's earliest possible date, so we will have a longer than usual period of summery weather after the summer vacation ends.  We are going to need to use this time veryt well.

This year, Halloween is on a Friday, making it an excellent night to entertain!  We'll talk about planning that later this month.

We will have a longer period than usual between Halloween and Thanksgiving.  Last year, we had little more than three weeks.  This year, we'll have a full four.  So we'll delay most Thanksgiving planning until after Halloween.  (Though if you are travelling, you want to make any ecessary reservations before September 15th.)

Unfortunately, Christmas is four weeks to the day after Thanksgiving.  That will compress time for shopping, baking, crafting, and celebrating.  That means we'll need to front load tasks to avoid overloading these four weeks.

There is an upside:  Easter is late in 2009, so there will be plenty of time to recover!