Chance to win one of three £100 Lidl vouchers by sharing your Christmas catastrophes and/or tips for a stress-free day...NOW CLOSED

[AngelieMumsnet]

Have you ever had a Christmas catastrophe? Have you burnt the brussels and gift-wrapped the Christmas cake? Or are you in fact a Festive Fairy Godmother, brimming with hints and tips and always on hand to help at this time of year? Please share your worst and best Christmas related moments and festive tips - you could win a Lidl voucher.

Lidl say "With fantastic recipes and tips galore, we want to help you breeze through the festive season, and avoid any disasters along the way. We’d like to know your best festive chaos stories, along with any hints and tips to make things more manageable. We have everything you need to help you get Christmas right; from turkeys and all the trimmings, to sweet treats that are too good to resist, so that you can pull off a flawless Christmas with Lidl without having to blow your budget!"

Everyone who comments below sharing how they got Christmas right (or wrong!) with stories, hints or tips, will be entered into a prize draw where three Mumsnetters will each win £100 worth of Lidl vouchers.

Please note that any comments posted on this thread may be used by Lidl in further marketing material (anonymously, of course)

Thanks and good luck,

MNHQ

Next year I'm actually writing a list of what's been brought. My brain is failing!

i'm with keeping it simple and having food that people love rather than what you're meant to have.

no point in having the stress of trying to force children to eat food they can't stand and certainly no joy in it for them that way or the people subjected to the stress at the dinner table.

also big gaps, and freedom from the table between courses.

oh and i'm a big fan of a fried breakfast on christmas morning that fills everyone up and gives them a stomach lining before the champagne and sherries start flowing and ensures no one is too stressed about what time christmas dinner is served.

i honestly think people just want it to be relaxed and happy rather than the perfect culinary experience and would choose happy and easy going over stressy and high pressure any day.

oh and delicious munchy bits on hand too to further add to the no pressure about what time dinner is served.

tbh i'd happily do without the big heavy dinner - never been a fan of turkey. now that it is just ds and i we tend to have a lovely cooked breakfast and then all of our favourite finger foods buffet style through the day.

My sister, in her Amy Winehouse phase, set her hair on fire by backing into a lit candle in a sort of wall mounted candle holder.

I somehow managed to fling my full glass of champagne very accuratly at the ensuing balze and and it went out before she got burned. She had to cut out a few chunks of frazzelled, sulpherous singed hair though. Crying.

And as a good example of how no good deed goes unpunished my mother announced that she had decided we only needed one bottle of fizz this year and there was none left.

Every Christmas is a disaster! We have an adopted daughter with attachment disorder who needs routine. Her birthday is in Christmas week. By the time we've been through the last two weeks of school, caught every bug going and sent her into a snotty emotional frenzy (no matter how calm and low key we try to be) then her birthday, we are in emotional tatters.

Next year I'm going to book a holiday to somewhere hot and miss the last week of the germ factory school. It just might save our family sanity.

Sorry... time of cheer n all that...

One time a great aunt was due to come for Christmas dinner and she offered to bring the bird. There was 8 of us and she turned up with a chicken the size of a pigeon. Then our horse escaped and ended up getting jiggy with another one next door, and we spent 5 hours trying to catch it. My granny was in tears because we missed church, and my parents downed a bottle of whiskey between them as they attempted, and failed, to catch the escapee.
We ended up with a slice of chicken and toast at about 8pm.

We are fortunate enough to have Christmas dinner at my parents', so I have never had to cook it. However, many years ago my mother boiled the pudding dry and filled the kitchen with smoke. My poor hamster had to be evacuated as it came coughing out of its little house. Another Christmas past, I took a new boyfriend to dinner on Boxing Day. Mum decided to update us on my grandmother's garden friends by announcing, 'Nan's got her thrush back'! The poor lad didn't know where to look.

Biggest disaster was the "Nigella" roast spuds. "Parboil them", she trilled, "and then dredge them in semolina flour".....
..... Of course mine overcooked, and so when dredged they totally fell apart! Saved them by pulling out and roasting the big bits. The other half was converted swiftly to mash, topped with cheese and grilled til bubbly. Of course that's traditional!...

OK, my best tip for a good Christmas is don't be married to my dh

He has put off discussing anything Xmas related since I first mentioned it only 6 weeks ago (no point in saying anything earlier). So here we are, today, I am ill with temperature, no present for dd, no tree, we have a duck ordered but it's not quite big enough as dh wouldn't agree to duck until the butcher had run out of bigger ones.

So tomorrow I have to drag my fevered arse around the city trying to get dd's present, and dh's (he doesn't know what he wants) and whatever other things we're going to need.

Oh, and he's drunk the Xmas whisky.

I usually manage to get things a bit better organised in spite of him, but I've been ill and he's been particularly evasive this year.

When the children were tiny we started having our first full Christmas meal by candlelight on Christmas Eve. This allowed for a very relaxed Christmas morning and I could enjoy being with the children and their toys - this was particularly important the year my DS woke at 10.30 pm and was hysterical because Father Christmas had not been. It took DH and me until 2.00 am to get him properly settled, and he got up again about 5.00 am (luckily Father Christmas had been by then). That Christmas Day we were all back in bed by 10.30 am. We enjoyed the relaxed Christmas Day so much that we still have our first main meal by candlelight on Christmas Eve - it's relaxing to cook knowing the shops are still open in case I've forgotten something.

Top tip... Never cook christmas dinner after working a night shift and try to stay awake, or you end up spreading the turkey with strawberry jam instead of cranberry sauce.
Or don't keep the two next to each other in the fridge!

My worst Christmas was when I was 11 and I got a hair dryer from my dad.
Yes I know how ungrateful it sounds, but come on I was 11, I had very short hair and I lived in India for crying out loud where if I sat outside my hair would be dry in 5 minutes flat.

My best was one when my dad invited all my cousins round and the adults were too drunk to drive home so we all had a sleepover. It was so much fun.

My tip for a lovely Christmas, go to your in-laws for Christmas, which is what we do every year. It does help if you love them and your mil is a fantastic cook!

Thanks for all the tips etc
The following three MNers each win a £100 Lidl voucher - well done!
Jelliebabe2, prettybird and Emrob86

A few years ago we had seven kids in the house and 4 or 5 relatives coming for dinner, so I was up at the crack of dawn putting the Turkey in the oven after only a couple of hours sleep only to discover the thermostat on the cooker had broken so the gas wouldn`t stay on! Took me about an hour to bodge it with a bit of cardboard holding the oven button in so the gas stayed on.
That was the first disaster avoided only to discover, an hour before lunch was to be served, that our pet Jack Russell had gone into labour and proceeded to fire out six puppies over the next couple of hours!
A wonderful experience but she could have waited for boxing day!