Will and I just survived hosting our first Christmas with both of our families together at our house in Lake Tahoe. In case you’ve also had a lapse in judgment and are contemplating a similar feat, fear not, for I have written down very detailed steps to help you on your own holiday hosting journey.

  1. Acquire social gravity. This can be done in a number of ways, most commonly by having kids, but we managed to do it by moving to a beautiful mountain town very close to several ski resorts. This step is often the hardest as you must convince your families that they should come visit you and not the other way around. 
Evening walk from our house to the lake with snowy mountains in the distance. Who wouldn’t want to visit?!
  1. Invite your whole family and your partner’s family to the house at the same time because the more the merrier Christmas, right?
  2. Do your best to stagger planned arrival times so the full 12.5-person crew isn’t all in the house together for more than a few days. Wonder if counting your two-year-old niece as a half person is accurate. Maybe she should count as two people. Revise the total to 14.
  3. Make a full spreadsheet of arrival and departure dates and times for each member of the family.
  4. On the same spreadsheet, make a dinner menu for each night and assign a few people to cook and clean. This is not a dinner democracy and your family does not get a say in when or what they cook.
  5. Print out the spreadsheet and hang it on the fridge for all to see and make endless endless fun of you.
Some sample days from the schedule I made, with nicknames instead of real names because this is the internet.
  1. Realize that the project you started a year ago to section off part of the living room with barn doors to have an extra bedroom when there are a ton of people in the house now has a very real deadline that is very quickly approaching. Panic accordingly.
  2. Decide that a house with zero Christmas decorations probably won’t win much favor with the families, or a willingness to come back again for the holidays. Panic accordingly.
  3. Google “prelit 4 ft Christmas tree” and pick one and then get told by your partner that an unlit tree would be better so it can live year-round in the living room.
    • Editor’s note: he was right, it is better. Writer’s note: he’s the editor.
The tree now lives behind our front door when it’s not on shift as a Christmas tree.
  1. Get invited to a friend’s holiday party where the main activity is ornament-making so you have at least a few small things to decorate the otherwise nude tree.
  2. Buy a bunch of twinkly fairy lights on Amazon that don’t actually twinkle or come with fairies. Return immediately since properly twinkling lights are a requirement for your mother-in-law.
  3. Get reminded by your partner that all the Christmas decorations need to fit in a single storage bin in the garage, but mostly ignore that small detail.
  4. Go nuts on decorations at Michaels but decide to be reasonable and come out with proper twinkly lights, garlands, some electric candles, a selection of Christmas-themed stems, and a Christmas-y table runner.
  5. Go on a work trip and return home on Friday afternoon right before your family is scheduled to arrive on that same Friday night.
  6. Frantically decorate before everyone arrives. At this point you don’t know that the table decorations will be moved to the corner everyday so people can work at the table, and one day they will never come back. Silently mourn the loss of the table runner and candle centerpieces which make up a full third of the Christmas decorations in the house.
It was nice while it lasted.
  1. Remember that a two-year old will be in the house for a week and wonder if it’s all going to get destroyed anyways. (Spoiler alert: it’s not and she’s super chill.)
  2. Welcome everyone into your home and remember that no plan survives first contact with the enemy family.
We did it!