December 2024 Bullet Journal Setup

Welcome to Day 1 of Blogmas At Home 2024! 🎄🎅🏻✨

That’s right: 24 days, 24 posts— the Gemma At Home Advent Calendar, if you will. I have so many fun and festive posts planned this year and I can’t wait to share them with you in the run up to my favourite holiday.

Just like last year, the first post of Blogmas At Home is my festive, December setup in my bullet journal. For my theme this year, I decided to pay homage to one of the most iconic Christmas treats: gingerbread cookies!

Equipment
Making the ‘Gingerbread Cookies’
Cover + Quote Page
Monthly Calendar
Blog + Advent Memories
Weeklies
- Week 1
- Week 2
- Week 3
- Week 4
December Review
Final Thoughts

Equipment

To make this setup, I used the following equipment:

Making the ‘Gingerbread Cookies’

Before I started setting up the spreads for this month, I made all of the ‘gingerbread cookies’ that I would need to decorate the pages. To do that, I started by sketching out a variety of festive shapes on the back of my brown craft paper (my craft paper has a rough side and a smooth side, so the ‘back’ was the rough side). I tried to cut out as many shapes as I could think of, including:

Hearts
Stars
Circles
Christmas trees
Gingerbread houses
Candy canes
Gingerbread men
6-pointed stars (to be decorated like snowflakes)

I filled a whole piece of A4 paper with the shapes, then (rather painstakingly, I admit) cut them all out. I then flipped them over (so the pencil marks were on the back) and used my white Gelly Roll pen to decorate them, as if they were gingerbread cookies and the white ink was icing.

I just had fun with the decorating, trying out different designs and patterns so that I had a whole variety of ‘cookies’. For the most part, I tried to outline each shape with my pen, to make them feel extra cookie-ish, but sometimes (particularly with the snowflakes), I skipped that.

Once I had all my decorated ‘cookies’, I set them aside to dry completely (so I didn’t have to worry about the ink smudging!) before using them in my spreads. I stuck them into the spreads with my Quickie Glue Pen, laying them out on each page first to check that I was happy with the position.

Cover + Quote Page

Aside from the rather elaborate ‘cookies’, I really wanted to keep the rest of these spreads super minimal, so that the gingerbread cookies were the main focus, so I only used the Uni Pen Fine Line pen for all of the writing/line work throughout the whole setup. I also opted to keep the fonts super simple: I just used a quick, messy cursive and a simple block capital style.

For the Cover Page, I wrote the heading in the middle of the page, then stuck in some of my favourite ‘cookies’ around it.

For the Quote Page, I opted to use a quote from one of my favourite Christmas films: The Santa Clause. The line “Seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing” is spoken by Judy the Elf, who is an absolute icon (I nearly went for “Thanks, but I’m seeing someone in wrapping.”, which is also said by Judy and is one of my favourite lines in the whole film, but I felt it wasn’t very pertinent to this spread/my life right now, as I am not, in fact, seeing someone in wrapping). Again, I added more ‘cookies’ to this page, including a gingerbread house cookie (with an artful candy cane hiding behind it).

Monthly Calendar

For my Monthly Calendar spread, I just drew out a really simple grid (6×6 grid squares per day). I wrote in the dates in the top right-hand corner of each box (let’s not discuss the extra ‘1’ in the first box… I changed my mind with the placement) and wrote the name of the month at the bottom. Then, I went wild with the ‘cookies’ and stuck them absolutely anywhere I could find space. It was fun.

Blog + Advent Memories

These spreads are a little different this month, because December is such a funny month in general, but I know they’ll be really useful.

On the left-hand page, I have my Blog Planning spread, which I usually include, but this one is actually for my January posts, not my December posts! That’s because I’ve been keeping track of my Blogmas At Home 2024 posts digitally (there’s a lot to keep track of), so I don’t need the space here and I figured I might as well use it to give myself a bit of a head start going into the new year.

On the right-hand page, we have my Advent Memories spread, where I plan to write down the fun, festive things I do each day in the run up to Christmas. I haven’t been including Daily Sunshine spreads in my monthly setups lately (where I write down one positive thing that happened each day), because I just haven’t been keeping up with them, but I think a list of all the things I got up to during Advent would be a lovely thing to look back on in the future.

Weeklies

Into my weekly spreads now and I’ve gone for the same layout that I’ve been using for the past couple of months: trimmed down pages in the middle that house my daily task lists, with the spaces on either side used for my general task lists. I’ve been finding this layout really useful, so I’m continuing on with it this month.

As always, I’ve covered the cut edges of the journal paper with folded pieces of the brown craft paper, because I have an (irrational?) fear of paper cuts. This time around, though, I also used a corner rounder to round out the cut corners too, to add a little softness to the spread.

I plan to use the space on the left to keep track of any Blogmas At Home-related tasks I may have, and the space on the right for any other, more general tasks I need to complete.

Week 1

The first day of December falls on a Sunday, so I opted to include it in my first weekly spread and make an 8-day ‘week’, instead of setting up a whole spread for a single day! Again, let’s just not discuss how I accidentally wrote ‘MONDAY’ for the 1st of the month and then tried (and failed) to change it to ‘SUNDAY’ (I swear, I do this EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH.)

Week 2

The second weekly spread was a regular ol’ 7-day week, so I opted for my standard, 2×4 layout (with a couple of ‘cookies’, where I could squeeze them in, to decorate).

Week 3

The third weekly spread is exactly the same as the second, but I switched up the position of the heading section (and, of course, started out by writing the wrong date… again). I managed to fit more ‘cookies’ on this one, though, so let’s just look at the positives!

Week 4

For the final weekly, I opted to squish in the final two days of December (which fall on a Monday and a Tuesday) and make a massive, 9-day week (I was feeling lazy).

December Review

Finally, we have my December Review page. I’ve kept this one very similar to its previous iterations: on the right-hand page, I have the heading and a space to stick in a polaroid from the month gone by (along with a copious amount of ‘cookies’, including a gingerbread house street along the bottom!).

On the left-hand page, I have my usual sections (ATP & WTA Top 10, #1 Memory and Monthly Playlist), but I’ve changed up the layout a bit this time around (100% so I could maximise the space for more ‘cookies’). Also, because the tennis season has officially finished now, these ranking lists will be for the year-end Top 10s. For the playlist section, I’ve included 6 spaces to write down 6 of my favourite songs from December (and I am fully expecting all 6 of them to be festive tunes!).

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m SO happy with how this setup turned out. I admit, cutting out all of the ‘cookies’ was a bit of a task, but I just put the TV on, went about my cutting mission and, honestly, it went by much more quickly than I expected! I had a lot of fun decorating the ‘cookies’: I’m not the best at piping, so it was nice to mimic the effect without the need for, you know, actual piping.

I also think this spread is really festive, even though the colour scheme is pretty muted. It has a chic, but also kind of cutesy, vibe, which I really love and perfectly encompasses how I’m feeling about the Christmas season this year, so this one’s an all-round win for me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this setup! What’s your December theme this year?

Gemma

xxx

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