The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll make the case for diagraming and labeling your holiday lights so that there is less thinking and time spent setting up  each year. I am not going to pretend to be some kind of holiday light expert, but hats off to those who REALLY do it up each year — I love amazing displays.  I have a very modest set up, but every year I bring out the bin of lights and garlands for our outdoors and I have to re-remember how I have set everything up in the past.  You know — which cord went where?  And what did I plug into this?  I have a world class terrible memory and because I’m slightly ADHD, this process takes forever since there are too many things happening with the whole family decorating and I end up in kind of an unproductive loop. Once I got it totally figured out this year, I decided I didn’t want to have to do all of that mental work again, so I spent a little time diagraming an...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share with you how I used Avery.com to print all of my holiday address labels for free. This is my annual seasonal challenge -- what is the best and easiest way to print address labels for my holiday cards?  I keep my addresses in a Google spreadsheet, which I update each year.  For a couple of years, I used a GSheets Add-on from Avery called "Create and Print Labels -- Labelmaker", but the formatting was awful and then they discontinued the free version, so you have to pay 80 buck for a lifetime license.  Which, honestly, doesn't make ANY sense to me.  I mean -- you'd think that Avery would make money from their labels, right?  Wouldn't they be able to sell MORE labels if they could make it easier to use them?  Last year, I resorted to firing up Microsoft Excel and Word in order to produce my labels, but I'm always salty when I have take steps back in time to u...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share some of my tips for getting organized over the holidays using Google Sheets and Toodledo.  I love the holidays, but like everyone else, I frequently feel overwhelmed by all of the additional tasks during holiday season — decorating the house and tree, ordering and sending holiday cards, and buying and wrapping Christmas presents.  All this amid lots of late-night seasonal festivities and, for us, holiday travel.  My very first order of business is that I cut myself some major slack around the holidays. I would highly recommend doing an analysis of what is critical to you and what is not and then prioritizing accordingly. For example, weekends are hectic for us at this time of year — my husband travels, my kids have a bunch of activities.  It was getting increasingly difficult to plan enough time on a weekend for all of us to go out, get a tree, put it up, and...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my family’s Selfish Gift Exchange tradition that we do every Christmas.  Okay — I’ve found that most extended families eventually come to a point where it doesn’t make sense for every person to give every other person a holiday gift. When you get to this point of family reckoning, there are generally 3 ways to handle it: 1) you stop giving gifts altogether, 2) you pool money for a group charitable contribution or 3) you draw names so that each person gives to just one other person.  My family started out doing #3 — drawing names. The problem was, we were not seeing some of my more geographically distant cousins enough to make even an educated guess about what they liked so — we were either giving complete dud gifts OR playing it totally safe and just exchanging gift cards.  There is nothing that feels more pointless than swapping $30 gift cards. Why even b...