How to Host a Holiday
I did it. At the age of 34 I finally hosted my first holiday. (And by hosted my first holiday I mean my house was used, but my mother still did half the cooking. Not by design.) Admittedly though, it was the perfect amount of easing into this coming-of-age milestone, and I was very grateful for the assistance.
Please note that this is not an article that explains an “easy” way to host a holiday. Truly the only way to do that would be to hire a house cleaner, a caterer, and wait staff – and then maybe an event planner. Depending on what you choose to serve, how many courses it will be, and how many people will be in attendance, this can definitely be the “black diamond” level of difficulty. If you’re looking to start small, maybe think of it as a dinner party instead of a holiday. (In my brain a dinner party doesn’t have holiday traditions, decorations, multiple courses, or house guests involved. Removing each of these items can lower the intensity.)
John and I hosted Christmas Eve dinner at our house on December 23. No small commitment for an Italian American who has grown up most years eating the meal of the Seven Fishes. (If you are unfamiliar with (our version of) this meal, it is about five courses full of a lot of seafood including pasta with crab sauce.) We made it our own though, and with some help from my mother, it was a success! I wanted to capture some of my process and lessons learned both for myself and others who might find themselves hosting a holiday in the upcoming years. Below is a breakdown of the steps I followed.
Identify the guest list
Choose the menu
Create the shopping list
Create the schedule
Move slow and steady through the week leading up to the event
Finalize the details the day of the event
Host the event
Assess the event for next time
Identify the guest list
You might be working with an already-existing guest list, in which case you can jump to step two, but if this is your first time doing a holiday, you have the ability to create a guest list that works for you. Will you just stick to family? Will you also invite cousins, aunts, and uncles? Will you invite friends? Can people bring plus ones? Will there be children in attendance? We decided to invite our immediate families and John’s grandmother, but only seven out of ten were able to make it.
Key considerations for identifying the guest list are (1) looking at how much space you have to seat people and (2) the style of serving food you want to do. While you don’t need the menu yet, you do need to know if you want everyone to be able to sit down at the table (or multiple tables). And if yes, make sure you have enough table space to do this. Admittedly, if ten people had showed up, I probably would have bought a new table (which I’ve been thinking about for years). If you plan to serve buffet style and let people sit wherever they find a seat, you have more wiggle room.
Choose the menu
This is really where you’re choosing the level of challenge you’re taking on. Are you going to order catering or cook for yourself? Are you going to cook something easy or complicated? Will you serve in multiple courses? Are you going to ask people to bring anything?
I’d recommend starting with what you want to eat as the host. Once you know what you want to eat you can decide who is going to cook it (you, another guest, or a third-party). I made my food list while waiting in line at a ramen festival in Osaka (as one does) and texted a photo to my mother. I took my favorite parts of the traditional meal and pared down the rest.
We decided on picante dip, welcome drink, and cheese plate; shrimp cocktail; lobster bisque and bread; pasta with grab sauce and garlic bread; roasted broccoli and carrots, twice-baked potato casserole, and crab stuffing; and cookies, brownies, and a dessert cocktail. (Some of these decisions were made slightly after the photo above was taken.)
I also tried to figure out what I could add in that felt like a touch of Chrystina. My initial thoughts were a signature cocktail and a cheese plate. We also added John’s family recipe of “picante dip” (a cream cheese and salsa dip) to add something from his childhood to the menu as well. We thought this would be a nice way to welcome folks in.
When I thought that it was just going to be John and I preparing for this meal, I had a plan of half catering and half cooking. While possibly taboo, my plan was going to be to buy the crab sauce and to buy stuffed shrimp. Based on my general nervousness around buying and cooking seafood and inexperience with hosting people for holidays, this felt like the best plan.
When my mother offered to come down early to help though, that changed everything. In fairness, I had only asked her to make the crab sauce, but she ended up taking over more items than I had anticipated.
Create the shopping list
I created the menu about three and a half weeks before the event. After that, I didn’t look at anything again until 10 days before. In listening to my mom and aunts talk about their experiences with hosting it seems like they start a lot earlier to look for sales and buy nonperishable items early.
You will also need to feed yourself (and possibly others) for regular meals while preparing for the holiday and add those items to your shopping list. What will you plan to eat during this prep time? When it comes to hosting people at your house, the added complication of that is that you will need to think about what food you will be feeding them while they are there. If you’re alone, you might be able to get away with eating your way through a box of cereal each night leading up to the holiday, but if you have guests, you might want to serve them something with – oh, you know, protein and nutrients. It also might mean that the cleaning needs to be done earlier.
In order to create the shopping list, I wrote out each ingredient for each dish and then rewrote the list consolidating like items together and grouped by where I would be buying the items: (1) the regular grocery store, (2) the liquor store, or (3) the Italian market.
I definitely see the benefit to starting to shop early, and I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t wait until the weekend before Christmas to buy anything in the Italian Market because it’s just too crazy (especially if you usually live two blocks away and usually can walk over on a whim). Maybe next time I’ll make the shopping list 15 days ahead.
Create the schedule
This is really where you need to start thinking about the big picture. You’re not only planning to cook, you’re also probably planning to clean, decorate, and possibly even host people at your house.
When thinking about cleaning I considered what truly needed to be cleaned. This is not time for spring cleaning, this is cleaning the things people are going to see. For us, that meant the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the guest room, and the guest bathroom. My office, our bedroom, our bathroom, and John’s office all stayed exactly as is.
Even after 13 years of writing about hosting events, I’m still not really that big into decorating. My plan is always to get the biggest impact for the smallest amount of work. Our Christmas tree was already up, I knew I was going to set the table, and I wanted to include an ornament and nametag for each guest. Twelve hours before the meal, I also decided to print menus that I made on Canva, which folks seemed to think made it really fancy.
Below are some questions you may want to consider as you are putting together you are creating your shopping list.
Take a look at the recipes. How many of the recipes have multiple steps or large periods of rest? An example of multiple steps is the lobster bisque. First, we needed to make the shrimp stock, which required having shrimp shells, which meant that we needed to make sure to eat stir fry for dinner on Thursday night to have the shells on Friday to cook. An example of large periods of rest is the sugar cookies. These can be broken down into baking the dough (then stopping), making the cookies (then stopping), and then frosting. In order to be most efficient, you can use these pauses and resting periods to work on something else.
Is there anything that can be prepared ahead of time? Shrimp cocktail can be steamed ahead and put in the fridge since it’s served cold anyway. Vegetables may be able to be chopped ahead of time so that you can just pop them out of the fridge to use in your recipe (note: do not do this with potatoes).
Are there any really intense flavors that you want to keep away from other flavors? We used Friday morning to make the items that weren’t full of fish – like cookies and potatoes. That way we were able to clean the kitchen before the shrimp came out.
I created three separate schedules to help me get through the week: a prep schedule for the week ahead, a day-of schedule to get through the final details, and a flatware schedule.
The prep schedule for the week ahead
This is the schedule that’s going to help you get through the week leading up to the event. The event we were planning was on Saturday evening with some guests arriving at the house on Thursday evening.
Sunday: Clean the house, do laundry, make nametags, decide on the table decor, and take out the items that will be used on the table. For me this included cloth napkins (which took some extra effort because they needed to be washed and ironed), a decorative plate, small candles, and gold stones.
Monday: Buy ornaments for each guest, go to the grocery store, and go to the liquor store.
Tuesday: Move the tables around. We were lucky that we had a very strong friend in town who was able to help us bring a table from the basement upstairs (and the kitchen table down) because it was able to seat 8 instead of 6.
Wednesday: Make a breakfast strata (a combination of this recipe and this recipe) for our houseguests to eat while they are in town starting Friday morning. (I ended up doing this Thursday morning and Thursday night.)
Thursday: Make cookie dough for sugar cookies in the morning, the cookies in the evening, and have stir fry for dinner so that we have the shrimp shells to make the shrimp stock for the lobster bisque.
Friday: Buy the rest of the ingredients in the Italian Market (except bread), make brownies, decorate sugar cookies, steam the shrimp cocktail, make the shrimp stock for the lobster bisque, make cocktail sauce, make crab stuffing, make twice-baked potato casserole, and chop vegetables (to roast on Saturday).
Saturday: Buy bread, prepare garlic bread, make bread (yes, we had two kinds of bread), set the table, plate the desserts, and finish making the lobster bisque.
(This is how cats help with napkin ironing in case you were wondering.)
Even with this much planning, there were still surprises. I took out the tablecloths, but didn’t check to make sure they were going to fit the newly repositioned, extended table until the day before the event, so we ended up using two tablecloths overlayed. I also made a special trip to the grocery store to buy pasta (because the lines in the Italian Market were too long to wait for pasta) and a special trip to the liquor store (because we decided we wanted to use real sherry instead of cooking sherry in the lobster bisque). And every time we finished early, we would look to the next day’s activities to see if there was anything else that we could do to get ahead.
The day-of schedule to get through the final details
In addition to the days leading up schedule, it’s a good idea to make a “day of” food preparation schedule. Essentially, when do things need to come out of the refrigerator, be put on the stove, and go in the oven? How much of this can be done before your guests get there and how much needs to come out of the oven piping hot? Here was my first draft schedule had the following milestones for an event starting at 4:00pm:
3:00pm: Finish lobster bisque, prepare garlic bread, prep lemons (for shrimp cocktail), put the sauce (with crabs) on the stove, and take potato casserole out of the refrigerator to warm up.
3:40pm: Take cheese out of the refrigerator to warm up and make cheese plate.
4:00pm: Make French 75 cocktails, picante dip, and put out cheese plate.
4:20pm: Plate shrimp and start water boiling for pasta.
4:45pm: Plate lobster bisque and put in potato casserole
5:00pm: Cook pasta, roast vegetables, and make garlic bread.
5:30pm: Eat pasta.
6:00pm: Eat crabs.
6:30pm: Eat next course.
7:30pm: Take out dessert.
While we definitely didn’t hold to the times on this schedule, it was the order in which everything needed to happen, so it was good to revert back to! We ended up adding in a bit of time between courses for digestion and chatting, and so dessert ended up rolling out around 9:00pm instead of 7:30pm.
The flatware schedule
You might be wondering what a flatware schedule is. I just invented it. This is the list of plates and cups that you plan to use throughout the evening. This will tell you if you need to buy more flatware (permanent or disposable) and/or whether you will need to wash things between courses.
Because we were only 7 people and I have an oversized flatware collection, we were able to use small plates for shrimp cocktail, small bowls for lobster bisque, wide bowls for pasta and crab sauce, large plates for vegetables and crab stuffing, and glass plates for dessert. We would be able to make it through the meal without doing dishes. If you do have to wash plates between courses, might I recommend our family’s motto of “don’t stack the plates” when you bring them to the sink? That means that you can just super quickly wash the top half and not have to worry about the bottom half. Anything for efficiency.
For glassware, we decided not to put anything out ahead of time and just do it based on what people wanted to drink that evening. Two people had tea, four had wine, and one had water. It was much easier to just take out two mugs, four wine glasses, and one tall glass instead of filling each spot with all three of those options. (Plus, we would have run out of room on the table.)
Move slow and steady through the week leading up to the event
The week leading up to the event is a marathon, not a race. Truly, it’s a slow and steady effort. Keep your schedule nearby and work through it item by item. When something is done, cross it off (the gratification of that is unmatched), and when something needs to move to another day, draw an arrow.
As you start moving through the schedule you might realize that some of the items aren’t actually needed. We realized that we did not need welcome cocktails, because nobody else would have enjoyed them besides John and me. (Which, in some cases, is totally worth it, but in this case was not.) We also didn’t end up making picante dip because we realized there was way too much food.
My mom was definitely a huge help in getting through this schedule. She had made the crab sauce ahead of time, and then took the lead on the lobster bisque, the crab stuffing, and the shrimp cocktail. A lot of the recipes were in her head and she kept “adding a little bit of this and that” to taste, but I think next time I would be able to do it more on my own because I actually got her to write down the recipes. I did do an excellent job keeping up with the dishes though.
The night before the event I sent everyone a photo of the menu and told them how excited we were to have them over. I always love building a little extra excitement before guests arrive.
Finalize the details the day of the event
Hopefully you’ve done enough prep work leading up to the event that you’ve got a fairly light day-of event. If this is true, you may even have time to shower and put on a nice outfit. If it’s not true, you may need to contemplate making some last-minute cuts and/or calling in reinforcements.
I kept my three schedules on the counter to make sure everything was done, and also took a tip from my friend Johanna and wrote each dish we were serving on a post-it and stuck those post-its to the microwave. When the dish was finalized, I would throw out the post-it. It’s a very visual way to stay on top of the to do list.
There are also always a few things that I like to do right before every party including making sure all of the bathrooms are stocked with toilet paper, lighting a candle in the bathroom, and turning on music (John bought new Christmas records for the occasion). These tips and more are touched on in a podcast episode with my friend Madeline on Gatherings Podcast S2E3: 10 Overlooked Last Minute Party Items.
And if at all possible, I recommend going into the event with an empty dishrack and/or dishwasher so that as things get dirty, you can get them right where they need to be.
Host the event
Once you start hosting your attention turns from getting the food done on time to getting your guests whatever they need to be comfortable. Take their jackets, let them know where they can put their bags, and offer them a drink when they come in the door. (It can be useful to have a second set of hands so that one person can still be in the kitchen at this time.) You’re just following the schedule at this point, while trying to be mindful of the ebbs and flows of the event and also trying to make sure everyone’s beverage glass is full.
Three things I made sure to do during the festivities were (1) to give all the guests an overview of what to expect in the next few hours. I said that there would be five courses and there would be some down time between those courses while removing dishes and serving, which I think is helpful both for mental awareness and food pacing. (2) When it felt like a course was coming to an end, I also offered Tupperware containers to my guests to put the rest of the food from that course in so that they wouldn’t be too full to enjoy the next one. (As somebody who has definitely been uncomfortably full to the point of sickness after a holiday meal before, I wanted to try to help everyone else avoid that feeling as much as possible.) (3) I offered paper napkins during the course with the crabs because I knew folks would feel uncomfortable wiping their hands on cloth napkins. This helped save my guests the decision making and helped save my napkins.
If you can remember, I also suggest taking some photos throughout the event so that you have something to remember it by. A pro tip is also to delegate a photographer. I have so many photos of holidays my aunts have hosted in the past because I wasn’t the one in the kitchen.
Something I hadn’t considered was the concept of leftovers. In the last seventeen years I have always been the guest, not a member of the household who was hosting, which means that I didn’t usually leave with any leftovers. As the person hosting, the leftovers were now under my jurisdiction. I was pulling all sorts of Tupperware out of all the cabinets in order to get everything packaged up.
It’s also its own project to figure out how those leftovers are going to be eaten. Are you going to be home the next few days to eat them? Do you need to freeze them? Is there somebody at the event who would really appreciate taking them home? We brought the leftover desserts and leftover cheeses to my mother-in-law’s house on Christmas Day, but I was still incredibly overwhelmed when I got home, opened the fridge, and realized that there was no way that things were going to get eaten in time. We froze the shrimp cocktail, the crab stuffing, the leftover crabs (still not sure how these are going to fare), and leftover crab meat. It’s been nice to have something nearly ready-to-go that we can pull out of the freezer.
Assess the event for next time
When the whole meal is done, it’s important to take a look at what just happened and jot down some notes (as ready as you probably are at this point to be done with it). This can help make things easier for next time (and probably save you money, because if you’re anything like me, you overbought).
We overbought cheese and prosciutto (and truly might not have even needed the appetizers). We only needed 4 pieces of 21-25 lb. shrimp per person for the shrimp cocktail source. 7 oz. of lobster bisque per person was perfect. One and a half pounds of pasta was also perfect. A regular 8x8 potato casserole would have been good if we hadn’t added in an extra 2-3 potatoes to finish the bag, the roasted vegetables were actually the right amount, we could have done with a lot less crab stuffing, and we definitely didn’t need as many desserts. (Cookies would have been enough, no brownies needed.) Our guests also brought pizzelles, two kinds of cookies, and two pies which were not factored into the planning – a delicious problem to have though!
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Overall, I’d say it was a good experience. People seemed to enjoy themselves and I really enjoyed having a house full of guests. I definitely had a lot of help, but it felt like the right ease-in to doing a multi-course holiday meal. Will it become a tradition? Great question. We’ll just have to see.
