Christmas is well and truly here, and as festive and wonderful as the silly season can be, it often leaves stress and anxiety in its wake.
Whether you’re hosting the big day for two or twenty people this year, our Ultimate Guide to Hosting Christmas will help you keep your cool and enjoy the magic of Christmas without suffering from a festive burnout.
1) Get Gift Buying Out of the Way With an Experience Gift Card
If you’ve got an entire Christmas gathering to plan, ensure you purchase all your gifts as early as possible to mitigate stress when the 25th rolls around.
In dire need of a last minute gift and not willing to depend on your online order arriving on time? AmazingCo’s experience gift cards make for the perfect, thoughtful, last minute gift - although your recipient would never know how last minute it actually was, they’re that good.
From Mystery Picnics -essentially a giant food scavenger hunt (!!!)- to online experiences such as At Home Murder Mysteries, there’s a an experience for everyone, and with experiences scientifically making better gifts than material objects, you really can’t go wrong.
2) Ask Everyone to Bring a Dish for Your Christmas Feast
While it is customary for each guest to bring a bottle of wine or a cheese platter for Christmas lunch, this still leaves the majority of the cooking portion of the day to you - an experience that is as stressful as it is difficult, to say the least.
Avoid the stress by turning Christmas lunch into a Christmas potluck this year, by asking each guest to bring a dish with them. Divvy up your guest list and allocate guests into starters, mains and desserts, and place everything on the lunch table for an eclectic, stress free meal. As well as making your day significantly easier, you’ll be able to taste everybody else’s favourite festive meals.
For a fun ‘around the world’ twist, assign each guest a specific cuisine, and ask them to bring a meal that is customary during Christmas time in that country.
3) Set Up a Drinks Station
To avoid spending the day in a seemingly never ending loop of topping up your guests’ drinks, set up an easily accessible drinks station. This way, you won’t need to play waiter - your guests can help themselves any time they like.
We recommend making the drinks station as pretty and festive as you can; buy a small steel ice stand, and display cocktail garnishing (such as rosemary twigs, juniper berries and fruit slices) on a lazy Susan.
Don’t forget about providing alternatives for those abstaining from alcohol; recent years have seen the market for non alcoholic beverages exploding, so there are plenty of non alcoholic wines and spirits to choose from.
If you don’t think you’ll be able to get your hands on these in time for Christmas, we recommend buying ingredients for easy, delicious mocktails that guests can make themselves - and trust as when we say that they’ll look just as pretty as the real deal.
4) Create a Collaborative Spotify Playlist
As if hosting Christmas day weren’t already stressful enough, the role of DJ falls on you too (and choosing music for the special occasion is a meticulously tricky thing to get right).
An easy, fool-proof way to create a crowd pleasing playlist (that also makes for a lot less work on your part) is to invite guests to add to a collaborative playlist on Spotify.
Collaborative playlists enable other Spotify users to add their own songs to the mix (and keep adding to it throughout the course of the day and evening), so you don’t need to scratch your head about whether Michael Bublé has made an appearance one too many times.
5) Make Sure the Kids are Alright
So, you’ve just sat down -after five hours of stress cooking over a hot stove and seemingly never endlessly refilling everybody’s champagne- and are about to begin your meal, when the kids start whining that they’re bored.
In order to mitigate the inevitable handful of bored children on Christmas (who keep -with reckless abandonment to your telling them to just hold on a minute- nagging you about opening presents), organise ways to keep them entertained while the adults polish off their meals.
Pull out all the old board games, or for a festive activity, set up a gingerbread making station for them (with pre-made gingerbread men they can decorate). This way, the children will have fun -and so they should, it’s Christmas after all- leaving you to enjoy your feast with everyone else.
Seeking extraordinary presents to make the gift giving process easier this year? Check out AmazingCo’s instantly delivered gift cards here, and spend more time planning on how to celebrate the big day instead.
