Don’t worry. I am not going to tell you to take your tree, lights, and decorations down. Not yet. Christmas isn’t really over. Christmastide, the liturgical celebration of Christmas last until Epiphany Sunday, January 7. However, there are some things your church should do right now.

1. Take your Christmas Eve service times off your website.

I hope you were able to post them early in December so visitors to your website knew when they could celebrate Christmas Eve with you. But now it is time to take them down until next year.

Perhaps someone visited your church on Christmas Eve, and they want to come back. When they go to your website to check on regular Sunday service times, you don’t want them to see that you haven’t gotten around to taking down the Christmas Eve times. Like it or not, it gives a negative impression. Your guest may wonder if you bothered to wash out the communion cups or pick up the used candles from the pews.

While you are removing those Christmas Eve worship times, why not make sure your regular Sunday times are big and bold and easy to see. Read my post “What can churches learn from expedia.com?” to understand why this is so important.

2. Schedule your January Christmas Eve planning session.

I know, you just finished Christmas Eve services, how can it be time to start planning for next year? This is the best time because this year is fresh in your mind. Meet with everyone involved in Christmas Eve worship to debrief.

Ask questions like,

• What went well?
• What could have gone better?
• What are we going to do again?
• What are we going to do differently?
• When do we need to meet again to start planning?

Write all that stuff down and keep it for when you begin planning for Christmas 2018. Want to make the meeting even more productive? Ask your team to do some reading before the meeting. Have everyone read my series, “Is it too early to start planning for Christmas? Or, is it too late?” This might help the team think of some things that they wanted to do this year but didn’t plan far enough ahead. Get some of those things on the calendar so that you won’t be caught short of time next year.

I pray you had a joy-filled Christmas! Want to share your stories of what went well, or not so well? I encourage you to share in the comments below.