How to Host a Christmas Quiz at Home

The Christmas quiz is the one tradition that survives every family. It also goes wrong in the same three ways every year: the questions are too hard for half the table, it drags on past everyone’s attention span, and nobody agrees on the marking. Here’s how to avoid all three.

Pick teams before you pick questions

Mixed teams make or break a family quiz. Put a grown-up and a child in every team, split the couples, and never let the two most competitive relatives sit together. Three or four people per team is the sweet spot: enough to pool knowledge, few enough that everyone gets a say.

Give each team a name. It’s the first laugh of the night and it stops people saying “that team” in an accusatory tone. If you’re stuck, we’ve got a list of Christmas quiz team names sorted from clean to cheeky.

Five rounds is plenty

After Christmas dinner, you have about an hour before someone falls asleep. That’s five or six rounds of ten questions, with a short break in the middle.

A good running order looks like this:

1. An easy opener everyone can score in. Confidence first.
2. A music round. Play a few seconds of each song after revealing the answer and you’ll get a singalong for free.
3. A picture round, handed out during the break so teams can work on it while the kettle boils. Our free Christmas picture quiz has twenty.
4. A family round the youngest can win outright. The family Christmas quiz is written for exactly this.
5. A hard round to finish, for double points. It keeps every team in it until the end.

Read slowly, mark as you go

Read every question twice. The second read is where the team that wasn’t listening catches up. Then do the answers at the end of each round, not at the end of the quiz, while people still remember why they said “Oslo”.

Swap answer sheets between teams for marking. It’s faster, and it turns disputes into entertainment rather than grievances. Decide in advance how generous you’ll be: we’d give “yellow” for the gold stars on the EU flag, and so would most judges worth their mince pies.

Have a tie-breaker ready

Christmas quizzes end in a tie more often than you’d think. Have a closest-number question in your back pocket: “In what year was the first royal Christmas broadcast, on the radio?” works nicely (1932). Closest guess wins; nobody can argue with a number.

Don’t write it all yourself

You can build a quiz from our free pages: the Christmas quiz has fifty questions over nine rounds, and the printable Christmas quiz comes laid out on A4 with a team answer sheet. They’re the free version: questions and answers only.

If you’d rather not spend an evening cutting and pasting, the full Christmas Quiz is eighty brand-new questions with a host pack, team answer sheets, a picture round and tie-breakers, ready to download.