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How to Throw A Stress Free Holiday Party

By Kelsey

on Dec 01, 2019

This year we are about to throw our 3rd annual holiday party and I get more excited every year!  Now that we have done it for a couple of years I have a good handle on what to do at what times to prepare and how the flow of the night should go.  In order to throw a party that not only everyone will love but that also will be low stress for you, I have a few tips!

Food:

• Never offer a full meal so guests eat dinner before they come.  I always serve a huge charcuterie board and some desserts.
• Last year for desserts I made Chocolate Peppermint Cake Cups with layers of chocolate cake and icing I mixed with peppermint extract topped with crushed candy cane in these little cups from amazon.  I also made this Paleo Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and served it in these little cups with the spoons that some with it!
• This year I am going with brownies and christmas cookies and will display them on big platters.
• All food should be able to be at room temperature for a few hours.  This is super important if you don’t want to stress.  Just set it out and forget about it!
• If there is any food that you might need to replace & refill (like chips & dips), then assign your friends to do it!  Everyone likes a job so tell one friend to keep an eye on the chips and tell her where they are so she can refill.

Drinks:

• This can be hard to gauge depending on what your guests like! Our first Christmas party I bought tons of wine thinking it was Christmasy but then everyone loved our cocktail so much that we ran out of that and had tons of wine left.
• We love to make a cocktail station where it explains what is is the drink and how to make it and put everything out so people can make their own drink!
• I also used these glasses for the cocktails because plastic is easy and the gold adds a perfect amount of class.  This year we are having old fashioneds so I got these cups that will work perfectly!

Decorations:

• This is the best part about a Christmas party, your house is probably already decorated!!

Activities:

• Christmas Music of course is a must and light some candles + a fireplace (or put the yule long on the TV like we do!).
• We have our party at 7PM (no kids, get a babysitter yo!), and most guests are there by 8.
• Then around 9 PM we do a game of holiday trivia.  I LOVE a party where you can win something so we bought 3 little presents at target ($10 or less) and had everyone break up into teams of 4.   They chose team names and we had little sheets of paper where they could write their team name + answer to each question. We would say the question and give everyone 1 minute to answer and run their answer slip up to us. The top 3 teams won the prize! This year we are going with 4 prizes and one winning team so each person on the team wins a prize. This breaks up the usual mingling and who doesn’t love some competition?! (Below you can find our trivia from last year & answer slips)
• Then around 10 ish it’s time for SNOW!! Now this won’t be applicable to people who live where it actually snows, but since it doesn’t here, we got a snow machine and set it up outside so it could snow and everyone could run around in it and take photos.  It was our big surprise last year so it is coming back this year and we will have a new surprise!

Here is the PDF of that with the questions and answers.

Here is a PDF of that with just the questions.

Here is the answer slip PDF, print out a ton and cut them into 4 pieces!