Overview
- Many families now juggle several Christmas dinners, sometimes four or five due to separated parents, with some choosing to spread visits into January or to simplify menus.
- Etiquette guidance stresses empathy, careful seating, checking dietary needs, keeping phones off the table, and steering clear of politics, war, money or sex at dinner.
- Psychologists recommend positive expectations, shared activities, timing sensitive topics away from tense moments, setting boundaries and using metacommunication to defuse friction.
- On Christmas Eve, households are welcoming asylum-seekers and people who would otherwise be alone, with hosts matched by charities such as Stichting Present and long-running community traditions continuing.
- Background reporting shows the multi-course kerstdiner is a 20th-century development with strong Victorian English roots, while some people lighten obligations by traveling or celebrating parts of the holiday in transit.