My Mom’s 30-Year Old “Yellow Legal Pad Method” Is a Holiday Lifesaver

On the Thanksgiving holidays that my mom and I are together, no Thanksgiving morning is complete without the two of us sitting in the kitchen over coffee and a pre-workout (for me) snack to discuss the order of the day. For these morning chats, my mom always brings out two things — a yellow legal pad and a Ticonderoga brand pencil — and begins to write a list of everything we need to do that day.

But what I didn’t know before I really started to help my mom out in the kitchen on Thanksgiving, was that the list making began days, sometimes even more than a week, earlier than the holiday itself. In fact, my mom has long followed a method for hosting I call the “Yellow Legal Pad Method,” which is basically a glorified, hyper-segmented, logic-based to-do list, created perfectly for her math-oriented brain. (I am woefully not math-oriented.)

“The way I start,” my mom told me when I called her to walk it out for me for this article [Editor’s note: when I called her, she was doing this exact process for a regular Sunday dinner], “is the menu. That’s a three-step process for me.” 

First, she writes out every dish my side of the family is responsible for making — sometimes, if we’re going to my aunt’s house, it’s just sides and desserts, but if we’re at home, it will also include the turkey.

She then flips over to another piece of paper and writes out the shops she knows she’s going to go to — usually a high-quality grocery store like Central Market (an H.E.B store), Costco (for multiple pounds of cheese, for example), and Tom Thumb for the rest (is it obvious we live in North Texas?). 

From there, she orders her grocery list by store, and then by section. In other words, she groups all the meat that might be bought at Central Market together, then all the produce, etc., and does the same for any other store she knows we’ll need to stop by.

As the week  goes on, we do a number of things to make the actual holiday involve as little labor as possible on a list that we’ve mapped out for days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. 

On each of those days we also have prep-work tasks — since we know what we’re making from our big dishes list, we also know what we can prepare in advance and what we cannot. While we would never make macaroni and cheese days before dinner, we would shred all the cheese we need a few days before, and could boil off the noodles the day before, too.

Additionally, my mom will write a “dash” next to each dish, and each subset task, and assign it to someone to do.

So, for deviled eggs (aka: Deviled Eggs – Lizzy), I would absolutely boil the eggs and let them cool in the fridge a few days before dinner — but I wouldn’t peel, slice, scoop and make them until the day of. Similarly, by the time we sit down on Thursday, some dishes are totally handled — like the cranberry sauce (usually also my job). Meanwhile, we also will have long crossed off defrosting the turkey, starting the process days before we’re even set to cook the dang thing.

But hosting a big dinner isn’t just about the food (though it is a lot about the food). We also mark out our days with other tasks — adding a leaf to the dining room table, bringing in extra chairs and a cardstock table, picking up the extra plates from my aunt’s house, buying flowers and building vases, batching Manhattans for a cocktail, creating the tablescape — all of which we do the day before. As we complete each task, we walk across the kitchen to the little table nook and cross that task off our list. It’s so satisfying.

“We’re always trying to do it so that we can do as little as we need the day of,” my mom says. “It’s about 72 hours of work for about 30 minutes of eating. You can quote me on that.”

While I love this list process, and I love sitting with my mom and figuring out all the puzzle pieces of hosting, the best thing it’s taught me is a way to organize my daily life.

On Saturday mornings with a cup of coffee? I may not use a yellow legal pad, but I am writing a list — for Saturday and Sunday — one I can go back to multiple times a day and cross off. For my workday? Every morning, I write a “personal” and “work” to do — with steps for each task — and cross them off as I get them done, or transfer them over to the next day if I don’t. And while I usually only visit one grocery store, I’ve long since adopted the “by section” grocery list method, crossing everything off as I make it happen. My mom has made me a list person. I’ll never go back.

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy. See it there: My Mom’s 30-Year Old “Yellow Legal Pad Method” Is a Holiday Lifesaver