Thanksgiving is a great holiday, its all about good food, family, friends and being grateful for the good things in your life. However, thanksgving can also be very stressful, with all of the cooking, shopping and preparation needed to pull off a great Thanksgiving fest.

Not to worry, it doesn’t have to be stressful at all. The key to a low stress Thanksgiving is all about the planning. So I am going to give you a week by week game plan on how you can prepped for Thanksgiving day.

Three weeks until Thanksgiving here is what you can do now to get a jump start on the meal.

1. Create your guest list

2. Order your turkey – Go to your local store and place  your order for your turkey now that way its ready to be picked up the day before Thanksgiving.

3. Create your menu

4. Pull out all your recipes and read through them carefully. Take note of any “make ahead” mentions in the recipe this could save you time later.

5. Check out what’s already in your pantry and create your master shopping list, dividing it into three sections:
1. Buy-now nonperishables (wine, canned pumpkin, spices, etc.)
2. Items for the one-week-ahead grocery run (eggs, milk, some longer-lasting meats)
3. Perishables to buy on November 19 or 20 (meats, poultry, certain vegetables)

Do you have to go shopping yet? No!

You can hold off on shopping until your two weeks out. If you do these things now you’ll feel way ahead of the game by the time Thanksgiving week rolls around!