Holiday Party Prep - How To Plan a Holiday Party

The key to a smooth running end of the year celebration is preparation. You want to start

as early as possible. In fact, you want to start right now if you're planning on hosting Thanksgiving

if you're planning on hosting Christmas dinner, an end of the year party, or a New Year's Eve

celebration. In this video, we're going to talk about how to plan a holiday party from start to

finish. First, we're going to start off with how to plan and strategize your event. Second

we're going to talk about how to prepare your home. And third, we're going to walk through

my 30-day holiday party prep checklist that will take you from 30 days out all the way until the

day until the party and let you know what you need to be doing on each one of those days

to pull off a flawless event. Hi, I'm Lindsay Diane from DianeDecor.com. Let's jump right into

part one of this video, and it's all about strategizing and planning your party

The very first thing that you're going to want to do is to choose the event that you want to host

So there are a lot of options at the end of the year. You have Thanksgiving, you have Christmas

you have just general end of the year celebrations, you also have actual Christmas dinner

and there's New Year's Eve. So decide which event you want to host. This is going to start

narrowing down that timeline for you and it's going to help you select a date for your event

Of course, if you're thinking you want to host for Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or New Year's Eve, this day is a no-brainer

Thanksgiving falls on Thanksgiving, Christmas falls on Christmas, and New Year's Eve, of course, falls on the last day of the year

But if you're planning just a general Christmas party or a broad end-of-the-year celebration for your friends or family or coworkers, you have a little bit of wiggle room there

you could host those events at pretty much any time in December leading up to Christmas

So start by selecting a tentative week and then move on to your guest list

Now with your guest list, you want to send out some general feelers. You want to see when people

are going to be available. Now, you don't want to do this for every single person you intend to

invite. You only want to do this with the people that are like must-attends, must-haves at your

event. So whether it's your mom or your brother or your best friend, the people that you would not

want to host an event without, ask them first to check on their availability before you start

sending out invitations because you can always make adjustments for them if you really want this

person present. The next thing you'll want to do is to figure out whether or not this is going to

be a small intimate gathering, a medium-sized party, or even a larger event that you may need

to host outside of your home. Who's coming? Who do you want to be there? What type of activity do

want to have. If you think that this is going to be something for maybe 20 or more people

you may consider having a venue outside of your home. If this is a smaller gathering that may be

10, 15 people or less than that, then you may be able to comfortably accommodate all those people

in your home. So decide whether you want something small and intimate or whether you want something

that can accommodate lots of folks, and the more the merrier, and let that be your starting point

because that's really going to inform your budget. It's going to help you know how many

people you can invite, and it will help shape your guest list

once you've decided whether or not you're going to need a venue and a rough number of people that

you're going to host you can start estimating your cost without either one of those things

you're going to be totally in the weeds so take care of those two first because they're going to

inform everything else. The amount of food that you need, the amount of drinks that you need

desserts, decorations, seating, all of those sorts of things really just depend on the number of

people that you're going to host and whether or not this is going to be in your home or whether

it's going to be at a venue that may have some of the things you need available to you with a

package deal. If you start estimating the cost of your party and you realize this is going to be way

too much, you can always scale back. You can always change the setup of the party. You can do things

like, okay, instead of me having 20 people, I'm going to invite 10. Or instead of me providing all

of the food, I am going to ask everyone to BYOB, or I'm going to do it potluck style. I'm going to

ask everyone to bring a dish, or I'm going to ask guests to either bring a drink or a dessert

Decide what you want to do to make the event affordable for you. You can always scale back

at this point because you haven't formally invited anyone yet. You're not setting any

expectations for anyone other than yourself. So go ahead and decide a rough number of people

decide whether or not you need a venue, and then start estimating the cost. You can estimate the

cost for both of them and just compare. But with those numbers, you're going to start walking

through what you're going to need and how much it's going to cost you and decide whether you're

going to proceed with that route or not. If you're going to host your party at a venue

that venue booking fee is probably going to be your largest cost

So shop around, look at some alternatives and try to get that number to a place that is okay for you

If you are not going with the venue, you can move right on to estimating how much food and drink you're going to need

and estimate some costs from there. I do have a menu planning cheat sheet that I going to link down in the description below It a pdf You can download it or print it off It going to help you decide how many of each thing

you need. So let me walk you through some of these figures. If you are planning on serving

one to four guests, this is a small intimate gathering, one to four guests, you're going to

need one main dish, three side dishes, two desserts, and two bottles of wine. That's optional if you're

planning to serve alcohol and one non-alcoholic beverage. If you are serving five to eight guests

you'll need one appetizer, two main dishes, four side dishes, three desserts, four to five bottles

of wine and two non-alcoholic beverage options. Nine to 12 guests is a good mid-sized party and

you're going to want at least two different appetizer options, two to three main dishes

four side dishes, a salad, four desserts, six to seven bottles of wine, and three non-alcoholic

beverage options. A larger party of 13 to 16 guests. This is probably the max that I would do

at my house because you also want to pad for maybe some uninvited guests or unexpected guests

Somebody you may have forgotten to invite at the last minute and decide, hey, I'm having this this

weekend. Why don't you come on by? I always like to leave a little bit of room for that. So for me

you know, more than 20 people is going to be a little bit tight in the house. So I might stick

to a guest list of 13 to 16 and leave four or five open for optional guests. So 13 to 16 guests

you're looking at three appetizers, three main dishes, six side dishes, a salad, six desserts

nine to ten bottles of wine, and at least three non-alcoholic beverage options. Now

if you're wondering about the wine math, this is how you figure it out

Take the number of guests that you have, divide it by five servings. This is the average amount

of servings in a bottle of wine. This is going to tell you how many bottles you need. Now

you are going to multiply the number of bottles you need by the party hours. So if you're planning

to host people for three hours, multiply the number of bottles times three, and that's going

to get you your total. If you're hosting people for four hours, multiply by four, and that's going

to give you the number of bottles you need. I will link below to some other resources if you want to

calculate for beer or for hard liquor. That one's a little bit dicier because everyone's pour is a

little bit different. But in general, it's safe to estimate, have bottles of wine on hand. That's

usually what most people do. And so I wanted to include that in the video. So now that you know

how much of everything you need, you can then work backwards and start to plan your actual menu

and decide what you want to offer. You know, am I going to do brisket? Am I going to do chicken

Am I going to do lasagna or pasta dishes? You can switch up your menu to accommodate your budget

once you know how many of each thing you're going to need, right? So some things are expensive. If

you want to have it catered from your favorite barbecue place that might be a little bit pricey

so you might want to have that as maybe only one of your main dishes instead of all of your main

dishes and make something that that goes far like a lasagna that's relatively inexpensive to make

and will make a lot of it and have that be another main dish option so you see how you can kind of

adjust it any way you like or you can again divvy it up if you want a party co-host or if you want

to ask guests to bring desserts or ask them to bring a bottle of wine or ask them to do potluck

and everybody bring a small dish and do it like that you can. When it comes to preparing your home

for a holiday party or really any party where you're going to be hosting lots of people

you want to, of course, give your home a deep cleaning. Now, this can take quite some time

especially if you have to fit it in between, you know, work and soccer and school and all

these things that you may be juggling. You might have to chip away at this list a little by little

or of course you can call a housekeeping service. But I think for a lot of us

we tend to want to do the deep cleaning stuff ourselves so that it's the way that we like it

And so it will take some time and give yourself a full month

to go ahead and knock out this list. Again, if you have, you know

it really depends on when you deep clean your home. For me, I like to do it in the spring

and I like to do it right before the holiday season when I know we'll have lots of people coming in and out of the house

But if you've recently done it in the summer, you might not have to do all of these things on the list

It really depends on when you've last tackled some of these areas of your home

So I'm going to give you the list that I usually go through when I do my deep cleaning

and just try to go through your home, take a look, see what needs to be done

and decide from there, am I going to try to bang this all out in one weekend

or am I going to chip away at it week after week after week throughout the month of November so

that when December comes, I'm ready to go. My house is deep cleaned. This is just a general

tidy and maintenance that has to happen up until the party from here. So here's my list. I clean

my baseboards. I wipe down all the interior doors and door frames. I dust my blinds. I clean the

interior windows and sills. I wipe down light switches and outlets. I clean out kitchen cabinets

and I organize the pantry. I clean cabinet fronts. I deep clean all the appliances, so my oven

my dishwasher, my garbage disposal, my stovetop, all of those things get a good deep clean

You also want to wash your guest linens Whether or not you expecting to have anyone overnight it just a good practice You never know what going to happen especially during the holiday season when people are traveling There may be flights delayed and flights canceled and somebody needs a place to stay You want to be ready So go ahead and wash

your guest linens and go ahead and deep clean or de-scale your coffee pot

In addition to your deep cleaning, the next thing that you'll want to do is tackle your fix-it list

So go through your house. Any of those little nuisance home maintenance tasks that you've been putting off, take care of them

So things like if there are light bulbs out that need to be replaced, go ahead and replace those

If there are air filters that need to be changed, replace those

water filter in the fridge replace that if the little light is flashing and beeping at you

you know batteries inside of smoke detectors hopefully you're not living with the chirping

but if you happen to be or see that some of the batteries are going to go soon do all those little

home maintenance tasks now and get them out of the way so that everything runs smoothly the day of

your event. Another thing you may want to do is look for slow draining sinks. That's one of those

things that we often ignore over time. You know, you just kind of get used to it. But when you have

guests in your home that may be using your bathroom sink or the shower drain or things like that

go ahead and make sure that all of those are clear so that everyone has a great experience while

they're in your home. If you're going to be doing a lot of cooking, you might also want to take this

time to sharpen your knives and get that out of the way because you may be doing lots of chopping

carving turkey, carving chicken, things like that. Get all of your cooking gear

ready to go so that you aren't fussing around with it at the last minute

Okay, so at this point you have now gone through all of your party strategy

you know what type of event you're going to host, you know roughly when you're going to host it and

how many people you're going to host. You have a rough idea of how much it's going to cost because

you know the number of dishes that you're going to need. You're going to know whether or not you're

going to have a venue. All of those things are taken care of. You also know the things that need

to be done for your home maintenance and for your deep cleaning. So now you are rolling into the last

30 days before your party, here's what you want to do. So 30 days out, you are going to choose a firm time and date for your event. You're going to

send out your invitations. At this point, you may also want to stock up on paper products that you

may need for your party. So if you're doing paper plates, napkins, you're probably going to need

paper towels, anything disposable that you may need for your party, you should start ordering

or purchasing now. You'll also want to make sure that that deep cleaning checklist is tackled. If

you haven't started it yet, you can still have plenty of time, you can start it right now

So two weeks out from the party is the time where you really want to start gathering your recipes

creating a shopping list, and fine-tuning your menu for the event. You'll also want to tackle

that home maintenance checklist if you haven't already. So make sure your yard is tidy, make sure

that your home is well lit outside, that you don't have any outdoor light bulbs that are out

make sure that your light bulbs inside the home are changed. Make sure you address any slow draining

sinks. If there's a tile that's broken that's kicked up that you need to fix or something like

that in the home that may become a hazard for a guest, make sure you take care of all of those

things at least two weeks before the party. The other thing that you'll want to do is to take

inventory of your serveware and of your glassware. So a lot of times we may combine disposable paper

products with our regular glasses, especially when it comes to adults and adults drinking

alcoholic beverages. You may often want to use your nice champagne flutes or your wine glasses

in addition to having disposable, you know, paper plates or something like that. So make sure

that you have enough. One, a great place to pick up inexpensive stemware if you're just trying to

fill in is Dollar Tree. You can get like a case of champagne flutes for like $12 at Dollar Tree

or I mean the price has gone up a little bit now, but assume it's going to be very inexpensive

If you need just a few more glasses to fill in, go ahead and get them inexpensively. You don't

have to spend a lot of money. You also want to make sure that you have enough serveware. So these

are your big platters, your big bowls. Again, you don't necessarily have to buy brand new ones from

Pottery Barn or, you know, William and Sonoma. You can very well buy some plastic or disposable ones

if you'd like. Just make sure that you have enough to be able to serve everyone out of

If you are using, let's say, chafing dishes and you are using the disposable aluminum trays

make sure that you're stocked up on those. Make sure that you have your gel fluid if you are using

the, you know, the little burners that go underneath. All of those things you want to

take an inventory of and stock up on if you need it. one week before your party is the time to start planning your party layout where is everything

going to be held are you going to have your food along this counter are you going to have

a beverage station over here where are you going to have people gather their plates and their

napkins and their bowls things like this start to lay out the party within your space or within

your venue space if you're able to go and preview it the other thing that you'll want to do is get

your final guest list count so that you know exactly how many people are going to be there

so that when you go to the store and start purchasing items you're sure that you have enough

one week before you want to purchase any of your specialty or alcoholic beverages during the holiday season stores are packed especially liquor stores They can get chaotic and you don want to wait until the last minute to hunt down something special for

your dad or your grandpa or whatever they like to drink. Get that stuff at least a week ahead of

time. Put it in your pantry. Put it away. Nothing's going to happen to it. It's not going to go bad

it's good to get that out of the way. It's also probably a larger expense so it's good to take

care of that and then you can also again as you go if you still need to adjust your budget as you go

for some of these other things but if that's something that's important to you make sure that

that's taken care of first. You'll also want to go ahead and purchase your decorations and do any of

your last minute lawn care. Doing your lawn care ahead of time is especially important if you are

planning on doing something like mulching your front flower beds, mulch can really stink sometimes

and you'd never want to do that like the day of your party or even the day before. You want to

leave that at least two or three or more days ahead of time. So a week ahead of time to have

your lawn cut, have your flower beds, you know, trimmed up, your hedges shaped up, and have

everything mulched is a good time to do it. Two days before your party is your shopping day. This is when you want to buy all of the groceries

that you're going to need to make your dishes. You're also going to want to take this time

to assemble any party bags or party gifts if you're planning to give out something like that

You'll also want to do an express clean of your home. So take a power hour, go through all of your

rooms, make sure everything is tidy and ready to go. And from then on out, it's just kind of

maintain your space game until your party. One day before your event is when you are going to do your final party preparations

So you're getting up as many decorations as you can. You are going to arrange your seating

You're going to stage your food and beverage area. So start laying out your trays and your platters empty in the spaces where you want them

If you have multiple like drink dispensers or something like that, make sure those are set up

Make sure that they're elevated properly. Make sure that you have room to put your cups next to them

Start doing this now so that you know that everything is spaced out really well

And then later on, all you're doing is putting the food in the dishes. You'll also want to prep as much food as possible the day before

This is just like Thanksgiving. As much as you can do the day before, do it

You don't want to be doing a ton of cooking the day of your event because you never know what could go wrong

So anything that can be made ahead, do it. Any chopping, slicing, dicing that can be done, do it

preparation for little appetizers, things like that, that can keep overnight, go ahead and do

all of those the day before. So let's say you have something like you want a little slice of

baguette with a cream cheese spread that's like seasoned. Make the spread ahead of time. Don't

slice the baguette until the day of, but you can let that spread be in your fridge, marinating

ready to go because if anything that's what's going to take you the most amount of time is

preparing that spread or that dip or whatever it is. So if you know that you can prepare something

and it will keep just fine go ahead and do that the day before. The day of your party go ahead and

prepare your final menu options or pick them up from the caterers if that's what you're doing

So your main dish, you know, meats, you're going to make those

You're going to bake or reheat any of your side dishes. And you're going to assemble your appetizers and start to lay out desserts

You can probably take some of that stuff out in stages, depending upon when you're going to start your party

But these are the things that you want to do on the day of. Again, you don't want to overwhelm yourself on the day of the party

because you want to be able to enjoy your party. You want to be able to give yourself plenty enough time for you as the hostess or host

to get ready, to be dressed up, to feel good, to not be rushing, and to know that everything

is taken care of and everything looks beautiful. You've done all of the prep, and so now is the time for you to really enjoy your party

and enjoy your guests. A couple of hours before your party, you're going to put your beverages on ice

You're going to give another quick express clean to your guest bathroom

and you're going to put up any final party decorations that couldn't be put up before

The day of your party is all about your friends and your family

and you guys celebrating whatever it is you're gathering to celebrate, so enjoy it

The only thing that needs to be done at the end of the night is to put away any food that may spoil

Honestly, I don't go crazy about doing a ton of party cleanup

I like to get the floors cleaned, food put away, and that's about it

Anything else can be tackled another day. The day after your party, you should rest and enjoy your leftovers and celebrate yourself

Watch a movie, hang out, enjoy time with your family. A few days later, you may consider sending out a thank you text message

or a thank you little electronic greeting to your guests. I mean, it really depends on how you invited them

So if you send everybody texts to, you know, come on over, then send a thank you that way

If you sent a digital invitation, send a thank you that way. I know not many of us send paper cards anymore, but it is nice to thank your friends and your

family for taking the time out of their busy schedule to come spend it with you at your

home and with your family. It's always a really nice gesture. That's it for this video

I hope you found it helpful. don't forget to check the description box below

I'm going to leave a link for my 30-day checklist as well as my meal estimator cheat sheet

I'll leave that link down there below as well. Don't forget to visit me at DianeDecor.com

I post all about home entertaining and decorating on a budget over there. And thank you so much for watching

and I'll see you in the next one. Bye