As the older generation gets older, the younger generation assumes responsibility for honoring family traditions. Your parents might have hosted Christmas for every year of your life, but for one reason or another — maybe they lack the energy to host, maybe they have downsized their home — they aren’t doing it this year. And, for one reason or another — you are the oldest child, you have the largest house, you are most enthusiastic about the holiday — you have taken up the host’s mantle.
However, your parents probably made Christmas look easy. As a major holiday, Christmas involves all sorts of traditions big and small that you must honor — or else you will suffer the wrath of the rest of your family. If you want to celebrate Christmas as you are accustomed to, you need to start planning the event for your home, ASAP. Here are a few tips to help make your first Christmas a true success.
List Your Most Important Traditions
Every family celebrates Christmas slightly differently, and when you host the holiday, you will inevitably put your own spin on your family traditions. Still, before you start changing the holiday, you should have a complete picture of all the important elements involved in Christmases past. You can begin by listing out any tradition you remember, big or small, but you might ask members of your family to contribute traditions that they cherish, so you can be certain that you are not forgetting a key component of Christmas.
Some of the most important traditions to maintain are those that add structure to the holiday. For example, if the Christmas season kicks off with a family trip to chop down a real tree, you should allocate a space in your home and invest in accessories for the tree, like Christmas tree stands, skirts, lights and toppers. You will also need to schedule various events on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, like cookie baking, formal feasts, present openings and more.
However, you should not be afraid of cutting traditions that cause excessive stress for many members of the family. For example, if you and your cousins put on a Christmas pageant or play when you were younger but the next generation is staunchly opposed to performing, you might replace it with a Christmas movie binge, a Christmas board game tournament, a Christmas craft or some other group activity. Traditions should cause joy, not strife, and as the host, you get to decide which traditions stick around.
Reimagine Your Space
Your home is likely to see more people visit during the Christmas season than it typically welcomes for the entire rest of the year. As the Christmas host, you will need to reimagine your interior spaces as entertaining spaces capable of fitting as many people as will celebrate the holiday with your family.
There are two main areas of interior design that matter during holiday festivities: room flow and seating. There should be a natural flow to your interior spaces, allowing guests to enter your home and navigate easily to the spaces you intend for them to be. To achieve this, you may need to rearrange the furniture in your entryway and foyer, creating more openness and wider walkways to facilitate movement. Next, you need to be certain that there are enough places for your guests to settle comfortably during your events. You may need to put some less functional pieces of furniture into storage and rent or borrow tables, chairs and sofas to achieve your seating goals.
Outsource, Outsource, Outsource
If you are a type-A person, you might be tempted to retain control over every element of your family’s Christmas celebrations — but this is a mistake. There are far too many components of Christmas to keep track of, especially over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and assuming the full responsibility of the holiday will only cause you stress and grief.
At least for your first few holiday seasons, you should work with your siblings or other close loved ones to share Christmas responsibilities. The easiest traditions to break up and distribute are the various Christmas feasts. You might assign different family members total control of different feasts — for example, one person handles the Christmas morning breakfast while another takes on Christmas dinner — or you might make each feast into more of a potluck. Then, you can spend less of your time sweating in the kitchen and more of your time enjoying the company of your loved ones.
Clean Up Before Christmas Ends
Before you allow anyone to leave your final Christmas celebration, you must enlist them to help you clean up and get organized for the end of the season. Guests usually do not mind wrapping up leftover food, washing and drying dishes, tossing out garbage and performing other simple clean-up duties, and many hands can accomplish so much more in much less time than your two hands alone.
Time brings change, even to tradition-laden holidays like Christmas. Fortunately, you can make the most of your first time hosting Christmas, and with the right preparation, you should be able to give everyone memories that will last a lifetime.
We realise that we haven’t covered Christmas dinner in the detail it deserves. Well, we’ve done just that here, so head on over and cook the greatest turkey of your life.