How To Host A Christmas Party And Cover All The Details

Christmas is almost upon us. Stores are having black Friday events. Santa parades are marching through the center of every town. If you’re planning to have a Christmas holiday get together, it’s time to begin planning. The following article on how to host a christmas party offers a few tips to help you plan that holiday party with minimal difficulty.

How To Host A Christmas Party- Tips and Tricks To Help Cover All The Details:

Advanced Planning – The Key to Success

Your first planning activity should be to decide how many people are being invited, what food will be available, will it be a dinner or a buffet, and what the decorations should be.

Photo credit:  From thecakeblog.com

Invitations with Expectations

When inviting people to a holiday party, a formal invitation is far better than a telephone call or an email. A written invitation makes the invitee feel important, and it offers you the opportunity to specify a starting time, and ending time, and a party theme. You can also define whether or not invitee’s guests are also welcome. An important tip for how to host a Christmas party is asking the invitees for a response to the invitation, including number of guests they will bring, gives you the opportunity to fine tune your menu and activities to conform to the expected participants. You may want to try these free printable holiday invitations.

If the party is going to follow a specific theme, be sure to indicate that on the invitations, especially if certain clothing styles or costumes will be expected. Be sure to send out the invitations soon enough to allow time for the invitees to respond accurately. Include a stamped RSVP card in the invitation to simplify the invitee’s ability to respond. If you are concerned about the consumption of alcohol during the party, indicate on the invitation that all alcoholic beverages will be provided. If some guests should bring a bottle anyway, thank them and put it away for another day.

Maintaining a Simple Theme

If you do decide to have the party centered about a particular theme, be consistent. If your theme is suggestive of a Dickensian Christmas, the menu should probably not include pigs in a blanket. Study the characteristics of the chosen theme and plan your decorations and foods accordingly. The parties are often more fun if the invitees are asked to offer ideas and contribute theme related decorations or foods.

A Workable Christmas Party Menu

When considering how to host a Christmas party, think seriously about the work and time involved in providing a full course meal. Such a formal event is delightful to attend, and certainly memorable, but it can be costly and very time consuming. If you can manage such an endeavor, pursue that theme, otherwise, plan a Christmas potluck buffet which is less work, less formal, but can provide an abundance of excellent food.

Decide, ahead of time, how you wish to handle alcoholic beverages. If you decide to have alcohol, and most Christmas parties do, make sure you also include non-alcoholic beverages for the tea-totaling crowd. Monitoring guest drinking is a burdensome responsibility for some hosts. You can gain a certain amount of control by limiting the types of beverages served: beer only, wine only, or beer and wine only. There is usually less of a problem if the hard liquors are not available. Your invitation can include that your party’s theme allows only beer and wine, and of course the traditional eggnog.

Plan for the Unexpected

Plan the logistics for your party, food and beverages, based upon the RSVPs, and then add another ten percent for those unexpected guests – and there will always be a few. If you’re having a buffet, plan on five finger sandwiches per invited guest, and plan for a two drink limit for alcoholic beverages. Always have an assortment of backup foods ready in case the finger foods disappear too quickly. Bags of potato chips, corn chips, peanuts, and cheese goldfish are always excellent filler for those that scavenge constantly throughout the evening.

Christmas Party Guest Safety

I did have the opportunity to attend one Christmas party where excessive consumption of alcohol was handled with extreme grace. No one was allowed to create their own drinks. The host hired a bartender with instructions for portion control. If in his judgment, someone had a little too much, subsequent drinks had little to no alcohol at all. The host at this party also had two friends who served as designated drivers for any guest who seemed to have outpaced his ability to drive properly.