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What do you really want for Christmas? More time, more joy, less stress?

Christmas. The holidays. Chances are, those words send happy images straight to your heart! Children's faces, breathless with wonder and delight. Shining lights on a beautifully trimmed Christmas tree. Delicious scents of fresh cookies and hot cider. A bounty of gifts, wrapped and beribboned. The cheerful hubbub of family members gathered from far-flung parts of the continent and even from overseas.

To those happy images of Christmas, some of us add another - stress! It appears that the holiday season can add a whole new set of challenges and chores to lives already busy.

Shopping for gifts. Wrapping gifts. Mailing gifts, These chores are only sustainable when one has a nice long chat with the other people suffering from aching feet and legs as we all stand in line at the Post Office.

Shopping for food with a million other frantic householders all trying to get their shopping done in their lunch hours or at weekends. Preparing meals that require two extra ovens, three extra hands and every serving dish in the house. Baking enough food for an army.

Bedding down houseguests in their choice of Little Mermaid or G.I. Joe sheets--no matching pillowcases--and setting the firstborn to guard the doors of jam-packed closets from curious visitors.

However, there is a solution: Outsource your problems to experts.

As Australians work longer hours and become increasingly time poor, they have been obliged to outsource many demanding household and domestic chores. Gardening and home maintenance are key areas being outsourced, along with household cleaning, laundering, car cleaning, dog grooming and similar tiresome tasks.

Cleaning was the first major area to be outsourced and grew in popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cleaning contractors had their beginnings in Australia in the 1930s. Although this industry had been in existence for all that time, it did not develop in the average Australian private household until the late 1950s. DIAL-AN-ANGEL was established in 1967 to fill a gap in the home market identified by Dena Blackman as she struggled to manage three active children under the age of six.

DIAL-AN-ANGEL is able to provide housekeeping services, child care, baby sitting, eldercare-at-home®, home- nursing, in-home entertaining and special family events as well as corporate functions.

Here are just a few things that DIAL-AN-ANGEL can be called upon to help you with over the festive season:

• Spring cleaning and garden maintenance to get the house the ready for guests
• Shopping and meal preparation - Caretaking includes watering the plants, collecting the mail, pet care (walking the dog, feeding the cat), sweeping paths and patios, maintaining a “clean and tidy” interior and exterior in your absence.
• Babysitting and child care
• Party help and large family dinners including meal preparation, serving up, clearing away and cleaning up afterwards.

Moreover, if you are stuck for something to give “someone who has everything else” then DIAL-AN-ANGEL Gift Vouchers make the perfect gift.

Danielle Robertson is the CEO of DIAL-AN-ANGEL®. Established in 1967 it is the only national agency specialising in the provision of home and family care. The company provides eldercare-at-home®, in-home nursing, respite care, palliative and convalescent care, as well as child care, housekeeping services, handyman services, in-home entertaining and corporate functions.