Fun Ideas to Introduce Festive Cheer into Your Office

Towards the end of the year, many office workers are experiencing a mad rush, trying to all of their work done before everyone leaves on holidays for the year. Introducing some festive fun into the office can help keep morale up while everyone wraps up for the year. Try out some of these ideas in the lead up to Christmas, and you'll find that staff are excited to come in to work, despite their workload.

Bringing people together

Christmas is a great time to strengthen relationships among staff and to have some fun after a hard year of work. It's also a time to create team memories that are talked about all through the following year. Try some of these great ideas and games that will help bring people together.

Christmas Cookie Swap

Have everybody bring in a batch of their favourite Christmas cookies and have a "cookie cook off" among staff. Appoint three judges to try the cookies and award them points, then hold a "cookie swap" so that everyone can take a variety of types home. (Participants may want to include a recipe card incase of dietary restrictrictions.) The winner could win a prize, or have their photo pinned to the wall for all to see throughout the year. Some yummy cookie ideas include: spiced Christmas cookies, orange and pistachio cookies, and rum and raisin cookies. There's likely to be lots of festive shapes used too!

Secret Santa

Put every person's name in a box, set a spending limit and one-by-one draw a name out, keeping it to yourself. Each participant will then have to purchase a gift for the person they drew out of the box without going over the spending limit. On the gift-giving day, gather everyone together and have someone dress as Santa to deliver the gifts.

Christmas lunch

Hire a local catering company to deliver Christmas lunch or ask everyone to bring a plate to share, or visit a local restaurant. Make it as festive as possible – there's nothing quite like bonding over bon bons and wearing silly hats!

Photobooth

Hire a photobooth for the day, get a range of Christmas props and let the staff go snap crazy for a day. You could ask people to bring in decorations, hats or tinsel from home to help fill the prop box. If your company has an Instagram page, you could upload the best photos there.

Christmas Family Feud

Send a survey out to all the staff with no less than 30 questions about Christmas. Ideas include: Name one of Santa's reindeer, Name a famous Christmas character, Name a drink you might have at a Christmas party. (Alternatively, you can find results from a previous online survey here). Then set up teams to play the family feud game, where people have to guess the most popular responses to the survey.

Christmas Carol Pictionary

Test your art skills by creating a "Guess the Christmas Carol" pictionary game.

Add a theme to your Christmas party

Themes are a brilliant way to introduce some excitement and separate your party from all the rest. Some great festive theme ideas include:

White Christmas

Throw an all-white party, from the decorations right through to the food and drink. Create a winter wonderland using white linen table cloths, chair covers, frosted glasses, silver cutlery and white candles in various sizes. Adorn the ceilings with white fairy lights, hang snowflakes and other white ornaments and ask everyone to wrap their gifts in white or silver wrapping paper.

For food, try serving white truffle bean dip, chicken breast with cauliflower gratin and vanilla-frosted cupcakes for dessert. Drinks can consist of iced eggnog, white sangria punch, or white hot chocolate with whipped cream topping.

Traditions of the World

Christmas is celebrated in so many countries in the world, and it really represents what brings us all together and makes us all so diverse. Planning an international-themed Christmas party shows you care about you staff's varying traditions. Decorate your space with handmade trees and star lanterns (Philippines), poinsettias (USA), paper chains and lanterns (China) and mistletoe (UK).

For food, serve up dishes such as pickled herring (Scandinavia), fish soup (Hungary), pavo (Mexico), fried chicken (Japan) and roasted goat (Portugal). Dessert can include pumpkin and walnut pie (Albania), fried dough balls (Central America) or chocolate yule log (UK). For drinks, try mulled wine (Scandinavia), spiced coconut eggnog (Puerto Rico) or Sorrel (Jamaica).

Christmas at the Beach

Bring a touch of Hawaii to your Christmas party and hold a tropical Christmas luau. Have everybody dress in their best beach get up, hand out leis, decorate with surf boards, thongs and beach towels, invite Hawaiian Santa in his Christmas boardshorts and dance the limbo.

For food, serve cucumber salad, Hawaiian egg rolls, prawn and pineapple skewers and rum-glazed spare ribs. For drinks, try blue lagoons, mojitos and punch.

These ideas are sure to get people talking in your office.

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Mireille Kilgour

Mireille Kilgour has been an entrepreneur for 35 years in the hospitality sector. French born, she has been an accomplished business owner and operator for a number of Sydney venues. Leading the industry with high profile institutions such as Lamrock Café Bondi, she has endless passion for the industry, and now has the pleasure of supporting restaurants to fill their tables with the new Good Food Gift Card program.

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