Christmas dinner is all about family reunions and an abundance of good food, but it can also be quite a stressful situation for lots of people. How do you please everyone? How do you manage to get everything sorted and organised before everyone arrives? Well, here are our 5 tips on how to have the most successful, joyous and merry Christmas get-together you could possibly have!
Discover our latest podcast
1 – Don’t try to make too much
Between nibbles, starters, all those side dishes and sweet things lying about, you have to admit that by the time you get to your main meal, no one is really hungry! Our advice? Don’t try to make too much food. There’s no point multiplying your canapés and putting out more sweet things for dessert: quality is always better than quantity.
Instead, it might even be better to just make some toast with pâté and a nice yule log cake for afters rather than laying out an astronomical amount of food on the table and then not knowing what to go for. You will save both time and money!
2 – Prepare in advance
We’re all aware of the fact that the day you spend preparing for a big reunion can seem like a marathon. To save time and keep your sanity in check on this day, try to plan ahead and prepare things in advance where you can. For example, you can peel the shrimp, peel and cut the vegetables and you could even make the dessert the day before too. You don’t have to wait until the last minute to put everything together.
3 – Ask for help
We always seem happy to do everything for Christmas dinner, but we’re not superheroes in the kitchen! Ask your brothers or sisters to pitch in or cook with a friend to share the load. It’s more fun to cook with other people anyway, isn’t it?
4 – Ask guests to help out
If you’re working on Christmas day, it can be difficult to prepare something amazing that will go down well with all your guests. Our advice? Ask everyone to be responsible for one part of the meal. To make things a bit more entertaining, you could establish a theme that will inspire your guests and work to everyone’s different tastes. This is a great solution if you want a friendly, cheap and quick Christmas!
5 – Consider recipe boxes or catering
Another idea we’ve come up with that will stop you from losing your mind fussing about preparing Christmas dinner is recipe boxes. These boxes are delivered to your home and contain all the ingredients you need for the big day. You only need to follow the recipes and it will still be entirely you who made Christmas dinner! And an added bonus? You don’t even need to go shopping!
But if you really don’t have time to cook, you could always consider hiring a caterer! Starters, main meals and desserts, your entire Christmas dinner will be ready and look amazing. And the plus? No washing up!
