Guide

How to run a Christmas quiz

A Christmas quiz is not a normal quiz night with tinsel on it. The room is bigger, it has usually been drinking longer, and half of it did not choose to be there. Plan for that and it is the easiest night of the year to get right.

Pitch it easier than you think you should

This is the single most common mistake. Regulars at a weekly quiz want to be tested; an office party or a family gathering does not. A Christmas crowd contains people who have never done a quiz in their lives, and a hard round makes them stop playing entirely rather than try harder.

Aim for a room where most teams get most answers. The competition still works — the gap between first and last comes from a handful of questions — but nobody spends the evening feeling stupid at a Christmas party.

Keep it shorter

Sixty to seventy-five minutes, not the usual ninety. People at a Christmas do want to talk to each other, get to the bar, and in an office setting, leave at a reasonable hour. Four or five rounds of ten is plenty.

Run it earlier in the evening than you would a normal quiz, too. A room two hours into a Christmas party is a different room, and not a better one for concentrating.

Rounds that work at Christmas

Mix festive and general. An entire quiz of Christmas questions gets samey by round three, and it disadvantages anyone who does not watch the films.

The reliable shape is: one Christmas general knowledge round to open, one music round (festive songs are unbeatable for this — everyone knows them and everyone sings), one picture round, one general knowledge round with nothing seasonal about it, and a final Christmas round for the finish. If you want one gimmick, a round on the year just gone works well — news, sport, whatever happened locally.

Handling a bigger, louder room

Christmas crowds are the largest of the year and the hardest to be heard over. If you normally read questions aloud unamplified, it will not work in December. Get a microphone, or put the questions on a screen so teams can read them.

Bigger rooms also mean more teams, which means marking takes longer. Either recruit someone to help, or use something that scores automatically — the marking is what turns a seventy-minute quiz into a two-hour one.

Prizes and teams

Keep teams a little larger than usual, five or six, so nobody ends up sitting on their own at a party. For a pub, a bar tab remains the best prize. For an office, small and slightly silly beats expensive: the point is the photograph, not the value.

A booby prize matters more at Christmas than at any other time of year. It gives the team that came last a moment rather than an embarrassment, and it is usually the bit people remember.

Where to get the questions

There is a free Christmas round with answers here, along with general knowledge, music, film, food and other rounds to build the rest of the night from. Print them or read them aloud — there is nothing to sign up for.

If you are running the quiz at a venue rather than at home, the general guide to hosting a pub quiz covers scoring, timing and the things that empty a room.