How to use National Food Holidays to Meal Plan

In my recent post"5 Reasons why you Should Meal Plan" I explain how meal planning has made life so much easier for my husband Gabe and I. In this installment of my meal planning series, I will be sharing how celebrating food holidays has made meal planning easier and more enjoyable!

Celebrating food holidays was an idea I had back in January 2021. I was trying to find fun things to do so I would have something to look forward to during the long, cold, depression-filled month of January. During the first few months of meal planning around food holidays, I was comparing what three different websites said were national food holidays. It was kinda confusing to figure out which ones really were holidays because every website said different things! I finally settled on using the website https://foodimentary.com/ to plan out my fun food holidays for the week.

At the end of each month, I get on Foodimentary and write down what the food holidays are for each day of the following month. Having these written down on my meal planning calendar before I print it out is super helpful and makes me feel excited for the upcoming holidays.

I enjoy celebrating food holidays for three reasons.

One, as I am planning out my meals for the week, I can look at what dinner holidays there are. This gives me ideas of what to eat so I don’t have to go searching Pinterest for recipe ideas.

Two, celebrating food holidays helps make the otherwise mundane weekdays a little more exciting. We feel especially excited when one of our favorite foods is being celebrated during the week.

Three, this gives us opportunities to try new food that we normally wouldn’t have. We have found a few great recipes to try because of the food holidays we are celebrating during the week.

Every month I publish the meal planning calendar with that month’s food holidays on my blog page “Meal Planning”. I have a free excel file you can download for the month and edit on your own computer! I like to download the calendar and then delete any holidays off of it that I don’t want to celebrate. (I usually delete alcoholic holidays because we don’t drink.) Then I just print the calendar off and put it in my meal planning frame for the month. This process is so simple and easy! Head over to my Meal Planning page to print off your free copy of this month’s food holidays! Be sure to come back each month to get a new copy for the next month :)