Are You Prepared For a Holiday?

One thing I don't believe I have ever seen mentioned is prepping for the holidays.
In the aftermath of of a "s" hit the fan scenario, I believe that holidays will be a stabilizing factor for families.
Since in the beginning I started storing items as I used them through out the day, then seasonal items easily started making their way into my storage. 
First let's start with the birthday cake. I am not a fan of cake, but my dear Mr. Perky enjoys cake. He likes cold chocolate cake, without any fanfare. 
As with any prep, you want to have a primary and secondary back-up stored. I also am not much of a baker at this time, though that will be changing.
So, in the beginning I simply bought and stored some cake mixes and stored them in Mylar bags. I haven't really been a baker in life in more recent years, though I did when I was younger. I have eggs stored with coconut oil, coconut oil which I now substitute for any oil & the mix.
I cut the directions out which I keep with my recipes. While doing this yesterday, I realized that I don't have birthday candles stored. Mr. Perky doesn't want to big deal made of his birthday, but you may want to store birthday candles if it is important to your celebrations.
About that baking pan...it is technically a brownie pan that bakes all edge piece brownies. After I got married I learned there are people that prefer inside chewy, moist pieces and those that like outside, crisp brownies.
I am an inside chewy and Mr. Perky is an outside crispy.
I found it works for cakes also. So when something is just for Mr. Perky I use this special pan.

Also, I stored two mixes at a time to conserve space. I just wanted to share this TIP. I opened the Mylar bag with my Food Saver to create a very straight cut line, which enabled my to reseal my package with the Food Saver again. Using the vacuum sealer only will seal a mylar bag, it will not extract the air.

 

You may also use an iron or flat iron for hair to seal the packages.
While I do have all this stored. I also have plenty of the items stored to bake a real cake again as needed. I will be using my grandmother's recipe.

Now gift wrapping. Paper is something that I believe will become valuable. Eventually we will start saving what wrapping we have and reuse it over and over again. We will use practical things we have on hand. Like these gifts for Mr. Perky. One is wrapped in some craft paper I have and tied with string (which I have stored for cheese waxing).
A second method I have been using is now being called "furoshiki". Actually it is a method that has been utilized for ages, but is coming back into style and really easy to do. Here is the second gift I wrapped and a simple graphic to get you started.

But it really is fairly simple to do. 
Sometimes "thinking" is an important part of prepping. For example thinking about what would be needed to be stored to make holiday traditional treats? Like for a birthday. As the next few months roll along, I will be sharing specific things that I stored to make some of our traditional holiday foods. Some of the items will eventually run out (pineapple for example), but for the beginning we would be able to maintain some of our family traditions which I pray will give my family extra heart doing tough times.
How have you prepped for holidays?

What I do here is simply share our preparedness journey. We would love it if you joined our Perky Prepping Gramma community on Facebook.

Here are some items I used or ordered this week:


   

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