As summer fades and the colder months creep in, your outdoor furniture takes a back seat. You spend more time indoors, leaving all those expensive chairs and tables to deal with the rain and the cold as you stay snug inside. But there are few greater joys in life than celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas outside.
It makes for a unique alternative to cramped dining rooms and evenings spent huddled around the TV. So, let’s look at some of the reasons why you should consider hosting those holiday get-togethers outdoors and the ways you can make them more enjoyable.
Why You Should Host Your Holiday Party Outdoors
Before we look at the tips for throwing the perfect patio party this Thanksgiving or Christmas, let’s look at the reasons why you should consider this in the first place.
No Mess
There will always be dinnerware to clean, food to store, and empty bottles to recycle. But if you host your festive dinners in your yard and not your dining room, you don’t have to worry about spilled drinks, slopped food, and everything else.
The problem with family dinners is that the kids get too excited and the adults get too drunk. By the end of the night, it’s like everyone has lost control of their arms and legs and it creates a chaos of spills and stains that you have to deal with.
When the party is outside, you can just wipe those stains clean, brush the crumbs onto the ground, and ignore all the spilled drinks that have landed on your lawn.
More Space
Unless you live in a city apartment, there’s a good chance that your yard is bigger than your dining room. It’s true for the vast majority of houses in the United States, and it means that you can invite more guests if you host your party outdoors.
If you have a large family, set the table outside and invite them all along! If you don’t like your family, just tell them it’s too cold and your dining room is too small.
Whatever you decide, it’s good to have that option!
Cozy and Festive
American families spend a fortune on Christmas lights, lawn decorations, and other festive paraphernalia. They plaster them on the outside of their houses—draped from the gutters, stuck on the roof, laying across the lawn—and then spend the season inside their homes, never truly enjoying those decorations.
If you spend some time outside—whether you’re eating your Christmas dinner or just enjoying some evening drinks—you can appreciate all of those decorations. They’ll bathe you in all the warmth of the season and give you that festive buzz that we all crave.
Pandemic Friendly
Tradition went out of the window in 2020 and we all experienced Thanksgiving and Christmas in a way that we have never experienced before. Many of us were separated from our loved ones and forced to swap the big family gatherings for quiet and subdued affairs.
Moving forward, we probably—fingers crossed—won’t need to deal with such strict restrictions ever again. But the problem is still there, the virus is still spreading, and outdoor gatherings are a great way of reducing the spread of infection.
It’s not a foolproof method, of course, but you are much less likely to contract something outside than you are inside.
Top Tips for Hosting Holiday Parties In Your Yard
Now that we’ve covered the reasons why you should host holiday parties outside, let’s look at the ways you can make them run smoothly and ensure your guests are warm, happy, and entertained in your garden.
Invest in Some Patio Heaters
The main problem with dining outdoors during the holidays is the weather. Rain isn’t much of an issue, as you can just make sure that you host the dinner/party during a dry spell, but the temperature will definitely be a problem.
That’s where patio heaters come in.
You’ve probably seen them on restaurant patios. They are very common in tourist locations and encourage diners to eat and drink long into the night.
The big units that you see outside restaurants can cost several thousand dollars, which is just not practical for a small house in the suburbs. But there are other options, including smaller, cheaper, and more portable heaters.
Invest in Jugs and Avoid Sloppy Foods
As noted above, you generally don’t need to worry about overly sloppy foods when eating outdoors. There are no carpets or rugs to ruin, after all. But at the same time, you don’t want to be carrying trays of drinks and soups out to your guests.
Unless you have some experience as a server, it’s not a good idea to carry foods and drinks over patios and lawns. You might be confident in your abilities to begin with, but once you’ve had a few drinks and you lose some of the light, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Instead, cook foods that you can easily transport to the table, preferably foods that can be served out of big bowls and platters, with everyone just taking what they want.
You should do the same with drinks, as well. Choose large serving jugs, bottles, and cans instead of multiple brimming glasses and mugs.
Serve Warming Foods
Salads, fish dishes, and other fresh and colorful foods are great for outdoor dining in the summer. You’ll give your guests a taste of Mediterranean dining, and that’s what it’s all about. But those foods are not quite as effective during the winter.
You want foods that are warming and filling, foods that are wholesome and hearty. The same goes for the drinks. Instead of cold white wine and beer, serve some hot rum drinks or warm cocktails.
Take advantage of seasonal foods like pumpkin to create warm, creamy, and hot dishes.
Cook Your Food on the Grill
If you cook your food outdoors, you won’t need to carry it from the kitchen and risk a disaster. You should think twice about cooking the Thanksgiving/Christmas turkey on the barbecue, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grill some burgers or steaks before the big day.
Pizza ovens are also becoming very popular as American families look for ways to cook authentic pizzas at home. They are surprisingly affordable, and you have a few different options to choose from. There are simple pizza stones that can be placed in existing ovens or portable metal ovens that will do all of the work for you.
In any case, it’s good to prepare and cook all of the food outside. You can even get the kids involved, making sure they don’t feel left out when the grown-ups are doing nothing but eating, drinking, and talking.
Hand Out Some Blankets
Your guests may be too polite to tell you that they’re cold. They don’t want to offend, and so they’ll just sit, shiver, and then wait for a time when they can slip away and return home.
Patio heaters go some way to providing the warmth that they need, but unless you have opted for huge units that keep everyone snug and cozy, they will still be a little chilly from time to time.
To counteract this, just hand out some blankets and pillows and encourage your guests to use them. If the blankets are there, they’ll grab them when they’re cold and they won’t need to suffer in silence.
Create Some Ambient Lighting
Don’t rely on the light from inside your house and don’t leave all of the work to a security spotlight. The former is often too weak; the latter is too bright. You want lighting that is strong but calming. It needs to help set the scene and create some ambiance, and that often means lighting candles and lamps and adding some lights to nearby fences/walls.
If you’re using candles and firepits, remember to keep the flames well away from tablecloths, upholstery, kids, and pets.
Invest in Quality Dinnerware
You don’t need to drop several hundred bucks on dinnerware that will only be used for one party, before being hidden away in a cupboard somewhere. An extra big serving bowl or jug won’t go amiss, but if you’re short of options and want to impress, it’s best to purchase some quality disposables.
Disposable dinnerware will save you from needing to clean everything at the end of the night and while it generally has a reputation for being wasteful and not very eco-friendly, there are better options out there.
You can get premium disposable plates made of palm leaf, for instance, as well as ones made of sugarcane fibers. They’re cheap, and they look much better than the wafer-thin paper plates and gaudy plastic plates that you remember using when you were a child.
It might seem like a bit of a waste, but you’ll be thankful at the end of the night when all of your guests have left, you’re a little tipsy, and you don’t have to spend the next hour washing dishes or loading the dishwasher. Just pile them up, throw them in the trash, and go to bed.
That’s the way that every dinner party should end!