How to prepare your home for Christmas

Posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2017

The festive season is a time of year when, it seems, your usual manner of looking after your house can go out of the window. That’s only a temporary change, of course – and can be well worth it for encouraging Christmas enjoyment. Here is how you can begin appropriately preparing the house.

Make sure your home will be comfortably warm

Of course, the weather is likely to be chilly, and so much of your enjoyment should be indoors. It would be a shame, then, if your comfort was hampered by your home’s heating system breaking down. Well before Christmas Day, check that this heating system has been serviced.

You can also follow up on Period Living‘s advice to set up a traditional fire or stove; this would be a wonderful touch for adding to the festive atmosphere.

Make your hallway welcoming for guests

If there will be many guests visiting your house this Christmas, you will want to give them a positive first impression. That’s possible when you de-clutter your hallway. You could also, as HouseBeautiful advises, have two rows of coat hooks to prevent guests’ coats adding excessive bulk to the wall.

Another option is placing an umbrella stand beside the door; when guests use this stand, it can prevent wet umbrellas entering the house and leaving water on the floor.

Suitably prepare for the big feast

If those guests will be coming around for eating, then you will obviously need to make sure that there will be enough food to go around.

You can ease the task of preparing large amounts of food when you de-clutter work surfaces in your kitchen. Also, remember that you will need tableware essentials that are not only sufficient in number for all of the guests but also look stylish on your dining table.

Consider how people will want to enjoy drinks

While you might have set aside the dining room as a place in which to eat and drink, it’s understandable if many guests follow you into the kitchen and drink there.

Therefore, you should arrange a drinks table to be placed in that room but away from where you intend to work. This is a good way of helping to ensure that your guests can enjoy drinking in this room without getting between you and your kitchen responsibilities.

Be careful with where you place the Christmas tree

Considering that a Christmas tree can typically be a six-foot pine tree, there’s the obvious question of exactly where to place it in the living room. You could move furniture around to ensure that the tree can attract the kind of attention usually reserved for the TV.

Should you struggle to fit a large tree into a suitable spot in the room, an alternative strategy could be placing two small potted trees on either of a fireplace’s sides.