How to Plan an Office Holiday Party When Half Your Team Doesn't Celebrate Christmas
How to Plan an Office Holiday Party When Half Your Team Doesn't Celebrate Christmas
Let me tell you about Marcus.
Marcus was the office manager at a mid-sized marketing agency in Austin, Texas. Great guy. Super organized. The kind of person who color-codes his calendar and still sends thank-you notes. In 2022, he was tasked with planning the company holiday party, and he went ALL in. Red and green decorations, a Secret Santa exchange, Christmas music playlist queued up on Spotify, and a catered dinner with a Christmas ham as the centerpiece.
Out of 34 employees, six were Jewish, two were Muslim (one of whom was observing dietary restrictions), three were from Hindu families who had mentioned before that Christmas wasn't really their thing, and one colleague -- a woman named Priya -- had specifically told Marcus in passing that she finds heavily Christmas-themed work events a little exhausting because she spends half the night smiling politely while feeling completely invisible.
Marcus didn't mean any harm. He genuinely didn't. But the party flopped. Attendance was lower than expected, the vibe was awkward, and by January there was a quiet HR conversation about how the company could do better. Marcus felt terrible. Nobody won.
The worst part? The whole disaster was completely avoidable.
So if you're the person in charge of the office holiday party this year -- whether you're an office manager, an EA, an HR coordinator, or just the unfortunate volunteer who said "yes" too quickly -- this one's for you.
Why Office Holiday Parties Keep Getting This Wrong
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most office holiday parties fail to be inclusive not because the planners are bad people, but because they default to what they know. Christmas is dominant in American pop culture. It's everywhere in December -- in stores, on TV, in every single Hallmark movie ever made. So when someone says "holiday party," the brain just... autocompletes to Christmas.
But workplaces are not monoliths. Your team probably includes people who celebrate Hanukkah, Diwali (which already passed, by the way), Eid, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or absolutely nothing religious at all. Some people are atheist. Some are agnostic. Some just really love the idea of a party but have zero interest in someone else's religious traditions being front and center.
There's also the pressure problem. When a holiday party is heavily Christmas-themed, non-Christian employees often feel like they have two options: show up and perform enthusiasm for a holiday that isn't theirs, or skip it and risk looking like they're not a team player. Neither option is great. Both options are kind of exhausting.
And then there's the planning-by-assumption trap. One person -- usually someone with the best intentions -- decides what the theme is, what the food will be, what the activities are, and what music gets played. And they base all of those decisions on... their own preferences and experiences. It's not malicious. It's just a silo problem.
The fix? Stop planning in a silo. Get your team involved.
The Case for Letting Your Team Actually Vote on This
I cannot stress this enough: the best office holiday parties are the ones where the team had a say in what happened. Not because it's some kind of feel-good exercise in democracy, but because people show up more enthusiastically to things they helped create.
Think about it. If your colleague Dani voted for the "Winter Trivia Night" theme and suggested the idea of a chili cook-off, Dani is going to be way more invested in that party than if she just received a calendar invite for a Christmas dinner she didn't ask for.
Running a vote or poll before you plan anything is not extra work -- it actually makes your job easier. You're outsourcing the preference-gathering to a process instead of trying to mind-read 30 people.
Here's what you should poll your team on:
Visit WhatsYourFifty to help your group make better decisions together.