Christmas and New Year Pre-Orders: Set Up Your Holiday Menu in October, Not December 15th

Every December it is the same film. The phone starts ringing in the first week — "can I order a festive platter for the 24th?" — and someone writes the answer in the notebook next to the till. By mid-month the notebook holds forty orders in three handwritings, two of which will get lost, and one just says "Maria — 2 platters" with no phone number. The kitchen finds out the real volume on the 23rd, when the options left are heroics or apologies.

None of this is a December problem. It is an October problem that surfaces in December. The offer was never pinned down, so every order starts as a conversation. The orders were never captured in a system, so the notebook becomes the database. This is the playbook for moving the whole thing online in October, while the kitchen is quiet and the menu can still change.

The Real Problem: December Orders Live in a Notebook

Every phone order interrupts service at the busiest time of the year. Nothing is confirmed back to the customer in writing, so half the pickups start with "I ordered the big one — no, for the 31st". Nobody can sum a notebook by day and hour, so prep is planned from memory and hope. This is not a staff problem; it is a tooling problem — a notebook cannot do what December asks of it.

The fix is not more people on the phone. It is moving the commitment online: a real product, ordered against a date and an hour, paid when it is placed. Everything below is how to have that running by the start of November.

The October Playbook, Step by Step

1. Turn the festive offer into real products, not a Facebook post

A festive platter announced in a social media post is a question generator: what is in it, how much is it, does it contain nuts, how many people does it feed. Turn every holiday item into a real product instead — a name, a photo, a fixed price, the allergen and dietary details, and a line saying what it serves. Do the same for a fixed Christmas or New Year's Eve menu: one product, one price per person. Customers then order it like anything else, every order arrives spelled out item by item, and your team answers questions with a link instead of a monologue.

2. Take pre-orders against a date and a time slot

Switch on scheduled ordering so checkout asks the one question the notebook never did: exactly when. The customer picks a pickup or delivery slot from the hours you actually work, and "sometime on the 24th" becomes "the 24th at 12:30". Your side of the bargain is a slot list: the kitchen can see, days ahead, how many platters leave at noon and how many at five.

By the second week of December, the slot list already tells you what the 24th looks like — how many pickups at 12:00, how many at 17:00, and which day is quietly overbooked. The notebook holds the same information; it just cannot answer the question.

3. Set holiday hours and deadlines that enforce themselves

December has odd hours: closed on the 25th, a short day on the 31st, perhaps a private event on the 27th. Enter them once as special hours and closures, and the slot picker stops offering those times to anyone. Nobody orders a Christmas platter for noon on a day you are shut — and nobody has to break the news, because the option never appeared.

Deadlines work the same way. Give the festive category a validity window — visible from the 1st of November, gone after your final order date — and the menu takes itself down on schedule. No "sorry, we stopped taking orders on Friday" conversations, and no order sneaking in on the 23rd for a platter your kitchen can no longer make.

4. Route big trays and office parties through a quote

A forty-person office party does not belong in the same flow as a two-person dinner. Route it through a catering request instead: the customer picks from your catering menu, fills in the event date, guest count, address and dietary notes, and submits. You review it, add the lines a menu cannot know about — delivery, serving staff, a setup fee — and send a quote. They accept it from the email, the deposit is charged, and the balance is collected before the event.

In December the guardrails matter most. A minimum order keeps tiny requests out of the quote queue. A lead time stops the form from accepting a fifty-guest event two days out. Pack sizes — a tray that serves ten, a tray that serves twenty — make the choosing honest, so the quote you price is the event they actually meant.

5. Take payment online, up front

A festive platter is shopped for, prepped and boxed for one specific customer. If that customer does not come, it dies in the walk-in — there is no second buyer for a personalised Christmas order on the 27th. So take payment online when the order is placed. Paid orders get collected — the customer treats the pickup as a commitment, not an option.

A paid pre-order is a plan. An unpaid phone promise is a hope. In December, the difference between the two is the food cost of every platter that was never picked up.

Staff Planning Falls Out of the Slot List

Once every order carries an hour, the rota writes itself. You can see which days are heavy, when the pickup wall hits, how many hands the counter needs, and what to order from suppliers for each prep day. The local calendar shapes the peaks: in Bulgaria the season opens early with Nikulden fish orders on the 6th of December, and in Greece the two big festive dinners — Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve — form twin summits.

The October-to-December Timeline

• •October: decide the festive line-up, photograph it, and create the products — platters, fixed menus, catering trays with pack sizes. Set the catering minimum, lead time and deposit at the same time.
• •Late October: enter December's special hours and closure days, give the festive category its visibility window, and switch on scheduled ordering with pickup and delivery slots.
• •Early November: open pre-orders and tell people once — a link on the website, in the bio, on the receipt.
• •Late November: the office-party quote requests arrive. Answer them the day they land, while both calendars are still open.
• •First half of December: watch the volume per day and let the deadline you set in October end sales on time.
• •The final week: print the slot list for each day and prep from it. Every pickup has a name, an hour and a paid total — the 23rd becomes just another prep day.

Where to Start

Start with one October afternoon. Pick the three to five festive items you already know will sell — the platter people always ask about, the fixed menu, the office tray. Photograph them in daylight, note what each serves, and build them as products. Then set the December hours and the order deadline, and switch on the slots. That is the whole setup.

The Catering feature page walks through the quote flow end to end — request, custom line items, deposit and balance. The Schedule Management feature page covers the machinery this playbook leans on: operating hours, special days and closures, and the validity windows that put a menu up and take it down on time. And if scheduled slots are new to your venue altogether, our guide to restaurant pre-orders and scheduled ordering explains the mechanics — slots, capacity and reminders — that a holiday season quietly depends on.