How to Plan a Company Holiday Party People Will Actually Look Forward To ?

Here I am again, picking up my pen to explore the wonderful, chaotic world of office managers: superheroes without capes who, ironically, don’t get a lot of presents.

Speaking of presents, are those sleigh bells I hear in the distance?

You know how the holidays work as well as I do. Every year, no matter the season, it feels like there’s plenty of time. Time to buy the gifts, time to think about the menu, time to plan the party. Then suddenly, without anyone quite understanding how it happened, it’s December 15 and you’re standing in line at Macy’s with 400 other people who had the exact same idea.

For a company holiday party, it’s the same phenomenon, except the punishment is slightly different. You’re not just late buying a gift for your mother-in-law. You find out that the Thursday night the whole company finally managed to block off is also the Thursday night 200 other companies in town picked.

And this year, that was not going to happen to us.

“This time, the holidays aren’t getting the best of us,” Juliette, one of our office managers, could very well have announced before heading into battle.

There it is: I officially feel like I’m writing a holiday tale. Might as well commit.

 

Chapter one: in December, three months ahead isn’t early

Juliette started exactly where we tell our clients to start: early enough.

For a big event, three months of lead time is already a solid baseline. For a holiday party, I’d almost call it the bare minimum. December crams a huge amount of demand into a handful of Thursdays and Fridays, with companies usually looking for the same things at the same time: a great venue, easy to get to, able to host a dinner and then a dance party, open late enough, with service that lives up to the night.

The best venues don’t disappear on December 15. They can disappear in September.

“For the holidays, the real luxury isn’t necessarily a bigger budget. It’s still having options. When you start early enough, you choose your venue and your date. When you wait too long, they choose you.”

Juliette, Office Manager at Naboo (quote to be approved)

That’s probably the first piece of advice I’d give anyone planning their end-of-year party. Before you talk decor, Secret Santa, DJ or menu, lock in the date and the venue. Everything else can still change.

The venue, not so much.

For our own party, we headed to the Pavillon des Princes

At the end of 2025, Naboo set up camp at the Pavillon des Princes, in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’s big green park on the city’s western edge.

The choice matched pretty much exactly what we were after. We wanted a real end-of-year celebration, not a happy hour with two strings of lights and a Santa hat on the DJ.

The venue had to let us welcome everyone smoothly the minute they arrived, have a coat check that could swallow coats and bags without turning the entrance into Penn Station on a Friday night, host a real seated dinner, and then let the evening shift into something a lot more festive.

That’s exactly what people sometimes forget when they’re looking for a venue. You can’t just look at the hero shot of the room. You have to picture the four or five hours your guests will actually spend there.

How do they get in? Where do they drop their stuff? Where do they get their first drink? What happens after dinner? Do you have to move every piece of furniture to start dancing? Can people move around easily? Can the music get loud? Until what time?

The venue often decides a big chunk of your night before you’ve even started writing the run of show.

It’s also one of the lessons we see over and over with our clients: a space listed for 300 people at a cocktail reception can feel a lot tighter for 150 people seated at tables. Always look at capacity in the actual setup of your event, not the most impressive number on the sales sheet.

 

We wanted a dinner, not just to feed 150 people

We went with a seated dinner.

It’s a format I especially love for the holidays, because it forces something our working lives rarely give us: sitting with the same people long enough to have a real conversation.

During the year, you run into a coworker in the elevator, for five minutes at the coffee machine, or between two meetings. A holiday party is the chance to mix teams, bring together people who rarely work together, and spark conversations that would probably never happen at a cocktail party where everyone drifts back to the five people they already know.

At the Pavillon des Princes, we deliberately worked on the dinner atmosphere. Not exactly a candlelit meal in a snowed-in castle, in the interest of full transparency, but much warmer lighting, big glowing holiday pieces and enough staging that nobody felt like they were sitting through the leadership team’s quarterly dinner.

“I wanted people’s first reaction when they walked in to be: okay, this isn’t just dinner with coworkers. It was the end of the year, and you had to see it right away.”

Juliette, Office Manager at Naboo (quote to be approved)

That’s a good rule for any internal event, by the way: don’t just ask what your guests will do. Ask yourself what they’ll feel when they walk in.

The first few minutes usually set the tone for everything else.

Bingo, or how to turn your coworkers into squares on a card

Obviously, getting everyone around a table wasn’t enough.

We’d also put together a bingo game built entirely around the people and the inside stories of Naboo, with prizes to win. It’s exactly the kind of activity that can be painfully corporate if it’s too generic, and really funny if it truly belongs to your company.

The difference is all in the content.

An off-the-shelf bingo card with “someone wearing a red shirt” or “someone who loves to travel” says nothing. A card full of references only your people would get turns into something else entirely.

The best internal games rarely work because the mechanics are revolutionary. They work because people recognize their company in them.

And when you suddenly spot your coworker in one of the squares, or a six-month-old inside joke becomes an official part of the night, you start creating exactly what you’re after with this kind of event: shared memories.

Then comes the moment everyone secretly dreads: Secret Santa

Secret Santa is one of those traditions everyone claims they could live without, right up until the gifts start getting handed out.

We’d set a reasonable budget: low enough that nobody felt any particular pressure, but high enough to find something a little personal.

The secret of Secret Santa isn’t really the gift, by the way.

It’s the moment.

At a big party, everything can quickly turn collective and over the top. The music, the dinner, the dance floor, the activities. The gift exchange puts something much more personal back in the middle for a few minutes.

Someone had to think about someone else.

Sometimes with a lot of care.

Sometimes very obviously five minutes before leaving the house.

Both usually make for excellent stories.

“Secret Santa is always the moment I wonder whether I’ve created a lovely holiday tradition or a slightly dangerous social experiment. So far, everyone’s made it out alive.”

Juliette, Office Manager at Naboo (quote to be approved)

The practical advice is still simple: set a clear budget, assign names early enough and build the gift exchange into the run of show. Otherwise, you’ll end the night with fifteen abandoned packages under a table and an office manager turned one-person shipping center.

And at some point, you have to push the tables back

A good holiday party also needs to know how to change pace.

Dinner shouldn’t feel like it’s going to last until breakfast, and the dance party shouldn’t kick off while someone is still trying to finish dessert.

At the Pavillon des Princes, the second half of the night moved to the dance floor. Once again, the venue made the difference. We could go from a calmer, cozier vibe during dinner to a full-on party without changing addresses, putting coats back on or losing half the guests in a transfer.

That’s something I’d check every single time for a holiday party: what happens after 11 p.m.?

Some venues are incredible for dinner but close early. Others naturally let you keep going into the middle of the night. That one piece of information can literally shape your whole program, and it’s worth confirming before you sign.

The same question applies to getting home. At 7 p.m., everyone’s happy to head to a venue that’s a little out of the way. At 1:30 a.m., in the rain, with 2% battery, the perspective can shift.

Subway, Uber, shuttles, parking or rooms on site: decide how people get out before you even plan how they get in.

 

What nobody sees on the night of the party

This is probably where I always come back to my office managers.

On the night of the event, if everything goes well, their work almost starts to disappear.

Check-in is smooth. The coat check works. The tables are ready. Dinner arrives. The game starts on time. The gifts are there. The DJ keeps the songs coming. People dance.

And nobody really wonders how any of it happened.

That’s a good sign.

Because before that night, Juliette had to compare venues, manage the budget, lock in the date, track RSVPs, coordinate vendors, plan around the venue’s constraints, prepare the games, organize the gifts, think through the run of show and handle the little surprises that inevitably pop up a few days before the event.

So a great holiday party isn’t just about finding a beautiful place.

It’s mostly about making all that complexity disappear before the first guest walks through the door.

“My goal on the night is almost to become useless. If people are having a great time and nobody comes up to me every five minutes asking where the caterer is, where the gifts are or when the game starts, it means the work was done beforehand.”

Juliette, Office Manager at Naboo (quote to be approved)

That’s probably the best definition of the job.

And if you want someone to carry that load with you, a dedicated Naboo event manager can take on the venue hunt, the vendors and the night itself.

A few venues we love for the holidays

Obviously, the Pavillon des Princes isn’t the only option, and the right party depends a lot on the size of your team and the vibe you’re going for. If your team is in New York, here are a few places that keep coming up on our list of the most visited venues in New York City.

For a holiday party nobody will compare to last year’s, the American Museum of Natural History lets you host your evening among the exhibits, with three event spaces to work with. Few things break the ice faster than having cocktails under a giant whale.

For the dinner-then-party format without changing addresses, closest to what we wanted for our own night, the Conrad New York Downtown can scale all the way up to 926 guests across six spaces. That matters fast once your company passes a few hundred people and the logistics start to weigh as much as the program.

For a more classic, elegant seated dinner, The Langham, New York, Fifth Avenue can host up to 234 people across five spaces. For a lighter, end-of-year drinks format with a view, The Skylark gives you four spaces and a rooftop setting in Midtown.

For a company ready to leave the city, the Catskills play a card that’s hard to beat in December. Timber Lake West in Roscoe can host up to 500 people for a full holiday retreat, while Callicoon Hills works beautifully for a smaller group of up to 65. If you were looking for the fireplace, flannel and coats-by-the-fire version I was selling you at the start, you’re getting seriously close.

And for a smaller leadership team that would rather put almost the whole budget on the plate than into fifteen activities, a great private dining room can be the event all on its own. Browse our restaurants in New York City for that version of the night.

If part of your team is across the Atlantic, our page on corporate events in Paris is where we keep our Paris favorites.

That’s also what I love about holiday parties: there’s no one-size-fits-all format. For twenty people, an exceptional dinner can be more than enough. For two hundred, you have to start thinking in terms of flow, spaces and pacing. For five hundred, access, crowd flow and logistics become almost as important as the program.

So, how do you plan a holiday party people will actually look forward to?

I could wrap up with a fifteen-point checklist and remind you to book a caterer, check the coat room and line up a DJ.

But the main lesson from our own party is a lot simpler.

Start early, pick a venue that can carry the whole night, and don’t pack the program just to fill it. A good dinner, a game that truly belongs to your company, a more personal moment like Secret Santa and enough time to party can be more than enough.

After that, it’s the details that make the difference.

The lighting when you walk in. Spotting your coworker in a bingo square. The surprisingly perfect gift from someone you barely knew. The table that ends up as a crew on the dance floor. The last song everyone will swear on Monday isn’t on their personal playlist.

The holidays will probably sneak up on us again next year.

But at least now, we know where to look.

And if you’ve waited a little too long, don’t panic: between our turnkey events team and Naboo Agency, we’ve still got a few tricks left in Santa’s sack.