Planning an Office Holiday Party

Video Transcript

"So you're looking to throw a holiday party at your office and you're not sure where exactly to begin. Well my name is Lori Randall with Simply Divine Events and I'm going to tell you how to throw a holiday party at your office. The first thing that you're going to want to do is check with your boss and find out the perfect location to have this holiday party and also grant permission that you can have a holiday party at your office. What I would recommend is if you have a training room, use that for your office holiday party. This is going to save you money so you're not going out, you're not going to a hotel and you don't have these event minimums there. This way you're just in your office, there's no rental fees or anything and most offices have like a nice large training room. You're going to want to pull everything out of the training room and turn this into your holiday festive look. Then you're going to want to set your budget. Decide on how much money you guys have to spend and that kind of depends on what you're going to do with your party. You could get a caterer and you can have a company come in and you could ask for alcohol have alcohol if you have a caterer come in just kind of depends if you have the whole liquor license that thing. If you guys are going to be doing more yourselves, I would steer away from doing the alcohol at the office. But if you have a caterer coming in it should be OK. And then think about who you're going to invite. Are you just going to invite employees and do it after work on like a Friday afternoon or are you going to be inviting your employee's spouses and families which I think is kind of nice that way you can just bring everyone together and you can make it more an adult and a kid friendly party. What you could do is you could hire a Santa Claus and at Christmas time, in the holiday times, this is pretty easy to find. You can go to your local talent agent in the area and they can get Santa for you. You can have Santa come in, the kids love that and maybe if your company has a little bit of extra money, you could give a present to each child that's coming and Santa can hand it out to them. If you're going to be having a caterer come in, think about setting up a nice little buffet. Here is what we did just kind of fruit and cheese, this more for the adult section. We had a lot of nice pas hors d'oeuvre and then just station and buffet hors d'oeuvre as well. So you can do that and really decorate it up. You got your cone trees that we have here. Just bring in all your nice looking and get like red cocktail table from your caterer. Put those around and then maybe you can section off the room and have the kids in kind of one area and the adults in another. And make some activities for the kids if you're going to combine this and make it a family event. You're going to want to think about maybe doing cookie decorating or also think about doing maybe ornament decorating. So those are some ideas on throwing your holiday party at your office and I wish you the best of luck."