The 5 Best Holiday Cleaning Hacks
Baking dozens of cookies and buying everyone gifts is the fun part, but with every Christmas season, especially when you're hosting a party or housing guests, there are a bunch of cleaning tasks to tackle too, from handling detritus in the kitchen to picking up pine needles in the living room. Searching for quick and easy solutions for de-griming all those parts of the house? Look no further than these five genius suggestions from Real Simple editors and experts to make those holiday chores more manageable (and keep you from acting like the Grinch).
RELATED: 8 Easy Home Upgrades on a Budget
You'll find it all right here: the most clever tricks for prepping the house for your guests' arrival, keeping it tidy while they are around, and cleaning up after all of the festivities have ended. There are solutions for preventing wasted time in the kitchen, ideas for speeding up the dining room set up, and answers for how to tackle the mess left in the holiday season's wake (so daunting!).
RELATED: 7 Ways to Arrange a Living Room with a Fireplace
By making just a few small adjustments to your normal holiday routine, you can save yourself a ton of time to actually enjoy the merriment and festivities without having to think about the impending cleanup. Find the pros' top picks for the sanity savers they use in their own lives to help manage the mess--from a collapsible storage bin for quick cleanups to a baking set that transfers easily from freezer to oven. Give yourself a break and incorporate these hacks before the holiday rush.