NOT Home for the Holidays virtual Christmas family ideas!

December 16, 2021 11:51 AM

Husband and I are not making it home this year for Christmas, much to our parents' chagrin, so we offered to make up a schedule of shared activities we can do over the course of a week or so to make up for it as best we can. Got a few ideas and looking for more!

We have a history of watching movies and shows "together" over FaceTime, so I think we can knock out at least two nights with family Christmas movie viewings. For another night, my dad is a pretty huge tabletop/gaming nerd, and we planned to do a family D&D one-shot for Christmas that has never gotten to take place, so I am also planning on DMing a D&D Christmas adventure for another night.

What else could we do that wouldn't be a total disaster over Zoom/FaceTime? My rough schedule right now is about this:

Day One
1. Decorating Christmas cookies? (CHALLENGE MODE: we just moved into a new place and don't have a functioning oven/stove, and won't until the new year)
2. Watch Klaus on Netflix with a shared cocktail recipe + cookies

Day Two
1. D&D family time

Day Three
1. Another Christmas movie (TBD) w/ matching cocktail and snack pairing

I feel like we could fill about five days' worth of events at least! All ideas welcome, and bonus points if it involves eating/drinking the same thing at the same time!

posted by caitcadieux to Human Relations (17 answers total)

During the early part of the pandemic, we couldn't visit my husband's parents at all, even though they were in the same city. So we were doing very regular Zoom conversations.

One thing we found was that for some (illogical? instinctive?) reason, eating together online was more satisfying than just talking. There was something just a bit more communal about it, though we were never eating the same food. We would set up a computer at one end of our table and have our dinner, and they were doing the same thing at their place. We would chat for about the same time (1-1.5 hours), but it felt more like we had had dinner with them.

We didn't try to coordinate what we were eating, but you definitely could.
posted by jb at 11:57 AM on December 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

We had a lot of fun earlier in the pandemic with a "Presentation Night". Everyone picked a topic and gave a 10-15 minute presentation, complete with slide decks and everything. I did Architectural History, my duaghter did her K-Pop fandom, my wife did the history of McDonalds, my mothere did a travelogue of the countries where she worked in the course of her career, etc. We let the kids in the family use presentations they had done for school, if they wanted, so they didn't have to do "extra homework". We are planning another one soon.

Board games can also work well. Not so much stuff with complicated tile placement or movement, but word-type games like Scattergories or Blank Slate are fun.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:05 PM on December 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

A gingerbread house kit would provide some Christmas theming without the need for an oven.
posted by kingdead at 12:12 PM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Making a ginger bread house seems like a good activity where you can “be together” without having to just talk the entire time
posted by raccoon409 at 12:13 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

For cookie decoration, you can buy sugar cookies and then just pipe icing and add decorations.
You can also find gingerbread house kits that come with the gingerbread pieces already baked - the focus is on assembly and decoration. Trader Joe's sells a gingerbread house kit that you might be able to find locally without having to ship it.
posted by metahawk at 12:18 PM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

We really enjoy playing COdenames online with friends. This is the one we use Here


There's also this version


We've been doing monthly trivia nights. There are 6 couples and we rotate who hosts. Host is responsible for setting categories. We tend to do lists. Like Top 20 Most densely populated countries. And then each team gets to give one answer, then hosts grade that at the end of the round, then another round etc.

Other formats "Here are 20 movies, put them in chronological order". That one is done by each team, and then you get points for each one that you have right. We always have a final round. And usually the winning team is the host next time.

IT works well, allows a bit of socialization.
posted by Ftsqg at 12:27 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

The latest iOS / iPad OS 15 includes SharePlay, which will let you all watch a movie or TV show together. It's limited to a few services right now, but you should check to see if the streaming service you like is supported.
posted by vitout at 12:34 PM on December 16, 2021

The Jackbox Games (they're collections of themed party comedy games) work pretty well for small groups remotely; will need someone to run the actual game on a compatible device, and everyone else needs their own screen (phone or tablet browsers work just fine) to interact and play. For families already comfortable using Zoom and similar, and especially comfortable enough with making online D&D work, it's probably a good bet you'll all get enjoyment out of it.
posted by Drastic at 1:02 PM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

Families tend to read/have the same books. You can play cryptocomms where the words [or letters if pushed] of a message /proverb are sent as page X, line Y, word Z and the other end/party/team has to get the answer [quickest]. King James Bible can be handy because-on-line and widely-available as Book, Chapter, Verse, Word.
Genesis 8.9.5.
Nehemiah 10.33.1
Ezekiel 33.8.6
Daniel 4.4.5
John 1.1.5
But The Da Vinci Code would do too.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:15 PM on December 16, 2021

Play The Quiet Year over Zoom. Info about how I set it up can be found here.

It’s a collaborative world building game and the main action is co-creating a map so it’s very fun to do on the whiteboard (the simplicity of the tools creates a great equalizer in terms of everyone’s artistic abilities - simple is great for the game).
posted by leastlikelycowgirl at 3:31 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hot chocolate tasting! Pick about five to seven different hot chocolate mixes or recipes that you can all have the same ingredients for.

Ideas include:
* Basic Swiss Miss
* Homemade with fancy chocolate
* Spicy hot chocolate
* White hot chocolate
* Spiked hot chocolate
* Caramel hot chocolate
* Peppermint hot chocolate, etc.

Add fancy marshmallows if you want. Probably best combined with a movie night or do one per day over the week and take notes!

It might be fun to play a long board game that you can stretch out over the week an hour a day too - Diplomacy comes to mind. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
posted by bananacabana at 3:31 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Do you know that sheet masks (hydrating facial mask that is literally a wet sheet, can be found in beauty section of drugstores or online) come in interesting Christmas varieties? I’ve seen elves, penguins, polar bears etc. Would be fun for everyone to get a sheet mask and do them together.
posted by MadMadam at 5:57 PM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Cooking dinner over zoom is pretty fun.
Decorating gingerbread houses. Buy a pre-made kit for $15 from Toys R Us.
The game Scattergories is great over zoom. Find an online version. It really feels like socializing!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:41 PM on December 16, 2021

Hometasking! Especially if you have more people who you’d like to Zoom-invite. It’s based on the British TV show Taskmaster and my sweetie and his sib set up a bunch of tasks last year and then collected everyone’s responses over a few days and made a slideshow, v amusing.
posted by clew at 10:29 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh, we've done Taskmaster-inspired games over Zoom, too! We actually did it live, using a PowerPoint deck to describe the task to everyone and embedded YouTube videos as the timer. Tasks like building visual representations of people or things with constraints like "using only things in the room you're in" or even "only in arm's reach without getting up", and creating poems/songs as acrostics.
posted by solotoro at 11:59 PM on December 16, 2021

or an even simpler game that worked for us over Zoom -- make a very simple shape, a sub-doodle of a few lines that takes up most of a piece of paper. Everyone gets an exact copy. You all draw pictures from the same shape at once and compare them when everyone's done. (This is a good waiting-room game too, you can play it on wastepaper, whoever finishes their drawing first makes up a set of matched shapes for the next round.)
posted by clew at 1:12 PM on December 17, 2021

Seconding the Jackbox games. Tee KO is absurdly fun if your family is cool with creative games, it was my 2020 gaming fave.

Also seconding The Quiet Year, which is a fantastic game -- unlike D&D which is open-ended, complex, and requires someone to step up as the Dungeon Master, Quiet Year is closed-ended, rather simple, and makes all players equal .. no DM required.

If you're comfortable with D&Ding online, you ought to be able to wrangle either of these with no problem.
posted by Sauce Trough at 2:45 PM on December 17, 2021