Help me plan a 90s Christmas

[Iamasentientoctopus]

For the last few years, Christmas has felt like a juggernaut getting larger and more expensive. I spent so long last year putting all of my carefully selected ornaments up, two Christmas trees etc I actually felt quite flat when it was all done. My house looked like an instagram post. Then add on the Xmas eve boxes, elaborate meal for 12, mountains of presents etc. I can’t quite describe the feeling but it was like the opposite of the warm festive feeling. I know I’m an adult now so Christmas isn’t going to be the same but I want to try and recreate some old school Christmas magic. I’ve had the idea of going full 90s in both decor and attitude and I definitely want to cut down on all the waste. So far I have on my list:

• A real tree with coloured lights and TINSEL. I’m going to let everyone else help me and I’m not going to obsess over how it looks.
• Traditional stockings left on the beds with a tangerine and little gifts - not making the stockings another £100 each!

I’d love some ideas/memories to add to my list. I’d love to get some of those coloured lantern lights my nan used to have outside but I’m also conscious I don’t want this to be another theme and spend a load of money! Thanks 😊

Do a lot less. Don’t buy a single new decoration. Don’t go to any Christmas ‘experiences’ (apart from church). Put the tree up a week before Christmas. Make your own Christmas cake.

Christmas Dinner - Don’t try any new recipes, don’t have a starter and don’t for heavens sake have anything except turkey, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, stuffing and gravy followed by Christmas pudding and brandy butter or custard. Sadly you won’t be able to have any nice boxes of chocolates to eat in front of the tv because they are all rubbish now.

It all sounds a lot nicer than the over hyped, stressful, 5 weeks long festival of shopping, hot chocolate drinking and making an enormous fuss most people call Christmas in 2025.

That sounds like 1950s!
OP- you do not need Christmas Eve boxes.

I got married in 1991,and my first Xmas with DH, we went to a bargain shop and bought lots of red, gold and green decorations, things like bells, and tinsel, and little 'parcels', also tartan bows! I was very chuffed with my 'real' tree. Those decorations lasted until my DD was 5 years old, and then I started to get more 'trendy' with decorations!
Also, the hanging chocolate decorations were a must!

Something to wear,eat,read,play with!
Thats all you need.

When my boys were little, they used to love bath time with candles instead of having the big light on. It's cheap but Christmassy. This was when bath time was supervised, but candlelight is still a cheap and memorable Christmassy fix.

I was born in 1951 . Christmas was lovely but didn't start until Dec 18th ! Tree went up then , just a small fake tree with decorations we had made and chocolate wrapped in paper hung with string . The stocking had a tangerine some nuts a few little gifts like a game , a soft toy , a tiny doll . Mum made a 'proper dinner ' usually a chicken , veg and roast potatoes. Then homemade trifle . Crackers to pull which had diabolic things inside like a miniature plastic gnome or a pack of 3 playing cards ! Tv in the evening all of 2 channels to choose from . I always asked for paints and a pad , one year a second hand bike with wonky handle bars . Maybe an extra few little things if you were lucky . It seems very spartan compared to today when Christmas starts being mentioned the first day of October. I have happy memories and never felt deprived .

Following

Yes! My Aunt had them, I think they must have been thrown away now.
I would add:
Christmas tea is turkey sandwiches, pickles available, cheeseboard, Christmas cake but also French Fancies (I don't think I had those any other times of the year).
Crackers were not fancy, basically red and green and made out of some kind of paper that stretched like crepe. Most boxes had a red fortune telling fish in them, made of cellophane or something.
Trivial Pursuit and charades for '90s (Who's In The Bag if you want charades without brainpower; play it the way the box says, which has 3 rounds if memory serves).

For anybody who is interested, there’s a lovely shop in Brighton which sells 90s style foil decorations. I absolutely love them.

https://blackoutshop.co.uk/products/foil-honeycomb-garlands?_pos=2&_sid=aab0f2194&_ss=r

https://blackoutshop.co.uk/products/rainbow-foil-holographic-honeycomb-chandelier?_pos=3&_sid=aab0f2194&_ss=r&variant=34307353935931

More tinsel
More colour
More baubles
More ceiling things whatever those long steeamers things are called

MORE TAT AND THEM SOME MORE

those big decorations remind me of pubs

A tipple of sherry in the morning. After eights and nuts with a proper nut cracker

I've always advocated for Christmas done this way in our house and the DC, who are much older now, still love it and actively ask to keep our little traditions.
I buy a tree decoration each year for the tree as my Mum loved Christmas, I always find some beautiful bauble in the bottom of a basket at local charity shops. So try your local ones maybe? Our tree is very colourful & decorated with lots of different baubles I've given a home, plus dc's handmade decorations from over the years.
We usually go into town to see the lights getting switched on, watch the parade and get a hot chocolate but I think we're going to give it a miss this year. The last couple of years it's been so busy & everyone seemed stressed to death. We didn't like the vibe!
We've decided to spend some time home instead, watching a Christmas movie and making paper chains to put up.
We usually have a Christmas crafting afternoon, usually making cards or decorations for family.
Two weeks before Christmas we start a festive jigsaw, usually from charity shop, that we all do together.
We get a TV magazine every year and mark off what we want to watch together.
We like to go for a walk on a night just before Christmas to look at people's lights. I used to get DC to count how many trees they could see on our walk when they were young so they didn't get bored/distraction...they still do this now!
I still use my grandmothers Christmas cake decorations on the chocolate log which is our Christmas eve buffet centrepiece. DC enjoy decorating it now whilst I'm prepping the rest of the food.
Stockings are filled with the smallest of bits, some practical stuff but DC love them. It's a really chilled affair on Christmas morning which starts with the DC coming downstairs with me to put the tree lights on, see if Santa has been and make drinks. They still insist on coming into our bed to open their stockings. Christmas night we pop over to see family and play some games.
Boxing day is usually a pyjama day with board games, TV, eating chocolates and DC enjoying their presents.
It's been those little things my DC remember, enjoy and ask to continue, not the amount spent of them. Don't put pressure on yourself, it's not worth it!

Paper chains!
a traditional advent calendar with pictures behind the doors!
board games and not tv unless it’s the sound of music, wizard of oz or queens speech!

My children were small in the early 90s and their stocking would have a chocolate orange, two were fruit avoiders, a carton of fruit juice, a book and a small toy. The idea was to get them to let us sleep in a bit longer.

If you can get lametta, individual long strands of tinsel, that was really popular.

Circle the things you want in an Argos catalogue.

Gotta stick on a rerun of Top of the Pops to get excited about what’s Christmas number 1… an advent calendar with No Chocolate… look at an old 1990 argos book to circle the things you won’t be getting!

This was our family Christmas as I grew up. The only “Christmas experiences” were the school nativity, the church Christmas fete (where we met Father Christmas), and midnight mass. Decorations went up one week before, food was good but very traditional.

Christmas definitely looks much more stressful in these IG days. Nobody needs two trees, so give yourself a break. Get one tree and get everyone involved in decorating - let them put the decorations wherever they like. If your DC are young maybe put glass baubles away for a few years! Retire the elf, ditch the Christmas Eve boxes. And what’s with matching PJs? That’s a whole other level of unnecessary extra stress!
Christmas Eve is perfect for a hot chocolate, Christmas movie (the cheesier the better) and an easy tea. Maybe crack out the boardgames.
In our house we generally adopted the something you want, something you need approach to take the pressure off present buying - but also we tend to get tickets or vouchers for some fun family activity to do after Christmas, so it’s not just more stuff being bought and we have something to look forward to when things are quieter!

You're the same age as me OP, born in 87 and I agree it's all got too much nowadays. I actively reject all of the extra nonsense and stick to what we enjoy about Christmas which is the food, the lights and spending time together.

I completely love Christmas and don't find it at all stressful but I think it's because we keep it simple and very similar to the sort of Christmases I had growing. So no Christmas Eve boxes, North Pole breakfasts or Elf on the Shelf. No matching family pyjama sets.....they do mostly seem to be purchased for the Instagram photos if I'm being brutally honest.

We have a tree that's a complete mishmash of decorations from grandparents that have now died, things DDs made at nursery and baubles collected on our travels. There is no colour scheme whatsoever and I love it. We wrap the bannister in tinsel and DD2 (aged 6) asked for "that fluffy, sparkly thing on the stairs" again only the other day. We string fairy lights up both inside and outside the house because I love them.

We stick to a few presents each and a Christmas Dinner mostly bought pre prepared and ready to put in the oven so I can spend Christmas Day drinking Bucks Fizz and playing with DDs. I refuse to get into debt for Christmas so no spending hundreds of pounds on presents.

Everyone comes round to ours for a buffet on Boxing Day but it's no stress because I just cook a big gammon and serve it with bread rolls, a salad and a cheeseboard. Trifle and Christmas cake for dessert as they can both be made in advance.

We go to the panto because we all love it and it's our tradition but other than that no big days out. There is a light trail near us that would cost us over £100 for a family of four which is utter madness. I just refuse to spend that sort of money.

We play games, watch films, see loved ones, eat, drink and be merry. You really don't need any more than that.

We’ve been doing this kind of Christmas since I was a kid, continued it with mine. I’m not about the aesthetic Christmas. When you have kids, it should be mostly about them and if your tree looks like a rainbow threw up on it then so be it. We’ve always had the retro decs but when we went to bed my dad would change everything so it looked neater. Thought we didn’t notice but we did. We’ve always don’t stocking on the end of the bed. Did try tangerines for a while but neither dc like them.

in the 90’s we’d go around to my nans house every year without fail. Visit my other grandparents half way through the day as they lived close by. Then go back to hers again on Boxing Day. Now I live with my mum, and before when my brother sister lived here we’d all just be together. And will be this year. Always play cards in the evening. Only thing that’s stopped really is we don’t watch eastenders anymore 🤭

You all need to dress up like this.

I get a real tree every year, always did growing up. I have the xmas box of decs now from childhood.
my tree is a big mis match of allkinds - i love it - all the old stuff comes out of the box and on the tree, i do get new littke bits every year too.
all my, my siblings and my own children's creations go on there - i love it.
its like - you can look at it for ages - all the different bits and bobs

edited - I am a 1982 baby 👶

Not sure if anyone has said it but we made paper chains in the 90s to decorate. Just a lot of old coloured paper or card and staple, or glue. You can get the lickable printed pieces too if you have nothing at home to use up. It's quite a nice thing to do while watching telly all together.

We did similar last year - just hermited and morning was playing games/reading from stockings and 1 present, then lunch and a little walk with the dog, then back for the rest of the presents and more games and some TV. Oh and a Christmas CD in the background for the present opening!

We're still putting up the same decorations we did in the 80s. The tinsel, coloured lights, ancient and less ancient baubles. Fir cones, holly. I do have battery candles now.

Still buy the Terry's chocolate orange, books, clothes, toiletries. Still play White Christmas album that my parents and grandparents played.

My sons home three Christmas trees. Two artificial, beautiful decorated ones in a colour scheme. The third in the hall is sons and grandkids. It's all colour, tinsel and candy canes. My other son and family are very traditional too.

We used to collect branches drill holes in a half log the kids would put in the branches, spray the lot white, silver, gold, hang small ornaments and put cotton wool roll on the log. Kept them quiet for hours.