The fact that searches for 'virtual Christmas party' were almost 3 times higher in August 2020 than in December 2019 speaks volumes about how quickly the world has changed recently since COVID-19.
Thankfully, we're in a much better situation than we were at this time 4 years ago. Still, for many in 2024, virtual Christmas parties will still be playing a huge role in family and workplace festivities.
If you're looking to bring the festive cheer online again this year, kudos to you. We hope this list of 11 fantastic and free virtual Christmas party ideas will help!
Your Guide to the Perfect Virtual Christmas Party
- 4 Reasons a Virtual Christmas Party This Year Won't Suck
- 11 Free Virtual Christmas Party Ideas
- Free Christmas Quizzes (for Download!)
- The All-in-One + Free Tool for a Virtual Christmas Party
Bring the Christmas Joy
Connect with loved ones near and far with AhaSlides' live quizzing, polling and gaming software! See how it works here 👇
4 Reasons a Virtual Christmas Party This Year Won't Suck
Sure, a global pandemic may be at fault for changing tradition, but we've already shown we can deal with it. Let's go again.
If you've got a positive attitude and the right enthusiasm for throwing a virtual Christmas party this year, here are 4 reasons why you should:
- Great for remote connection - Chances are that at least one of your party guests wouldn't have been able to make it to a live party anyway. Virtual Christmas parties keep family and work ties solid, no matter how far away the guests are.
- So many ideas - The possibilities for a virtual Christmas party are virtually endless. You can adapt any of the ideas below to suit your guests and keep the festive cheer flowing throughout.
- Super flexible - Not needing to travel anywhere means that you can knock out parties with your family, friends and colleagues all in the same day! If that's too much, and if you're not relying on transport, you're able to change the dates at the drop of a hat.
- Great practice for the future - You may have already experienced a virtual Christmas party last year; who's to say how many more we'll have? As more workplace staff go remote, and with us all now acutely more aware of the threat of pandemics, the reality is that these types of online festivities may carry on. Better prepare for it!
11 Free Virtual Christmas Party Ideas
Here we go then; 11 free virtual Christmas party ideas suitable for a family, friend or remote office Christmas!
Idea #1 - Christmas Ice Breakers
What better time of the year can there be to break the ice? This is especially true when it comes to a virtual Christmas party, where newcomers might be a bit overwhelmed with what's going on.
Fluid conversation might be hard to come by before the booze starts flowing. So, break opening a few festive ice breakers might get your party off to a flyer.
Here's a few ice breaking ideas for a virtual Christmas party:
- Share a hilarious Christmas memory - Give everyone 5 minutes to think of and write down something hilarious that's happened to them during past holidays. If it's embarrassing, you can easily make it anonymous!
- Alternative Christmas lyrics - Offer the first part of a Christmas carol lyric and get everyone to come up with a better ending. Again, the anxiety shackles are off if you make answers anonymous!
- Which image or GIF best describes your Christmas so far? - Provide a few images and GIFs and ask your audience to vote on which one best describes their hectic holiday period.
If you're looking for more, we've got 10 great icebreaker games here! Best for hybrid workplace parties and any of these ideas can be adapted to any virtual Christmas party with family and friends.
Idea #2 - Virtual Christmas Quiz
You probably noticed this already, but Zoom quizzes really took off in 2020. They've become a staple of virtual offices, virtual pubs, and now, virtual Christmas parties.
Technology has more than met the social demands that this and last year have brought. You can now make super fun, interactive quizzes online and host them live for free. Super fun, interactive and free is totally our bag.
Click on the images below to get live quiz templates on AhaSlides!
❄️ Bonus: Play a fun and not family-friendly Goopy Christmas to spice up the night and get guaranteed waves of laughter.
Idea #3 - Christmas Karaoke
We don't have to miss out on any drunk, spirited singing this year. It's perfectly possible to do karaoke online nowadays and anyone on their 12th eggnog might be practically demanding it.
It's also super easy to do...
Just create a room on Sync Video, a free, no-sign-up service that lets you precisely sync videos so that every attendant of your virtual Christmas party can watch them at the same time.
Once your room is open and you have your attendants, you can queue up a bunch of karaoke hits on YouTube and each person can belt their holiday heart out.
Idea #4 - Virtual Secret Santa
Okay, so not technically free, this one, but it can certainly be cheap!
Virtual secret Santa works the same way as it always does - just online. Pull names out of a hat and assign each name to a person attending your virtual Christmas party (you can also do all of this online).
Delivery services naturally step up their game during Christmas. You should be able to get pretty much anything delivered to the house of whoever you were assigned.
A couple of tips....
- Give it a theme, like 'something purple' or 'something personalised with the face of the person you got'.
- Put a strict budget on gifts. There's usually a lot of hilarity that results from a $5 present.
Idea #5 - Spin the Wheel
Got an idea for a Christmas-themed gameshow? If it's a game worth its salt, it'll be played on an interactive spinner wheel!
Don't fret if you don't have a gameshow to pitch - the AhaSlides spinner wheel can be spun for pretty much anything you can think of!
- Trivia with Prizes - Assign each segment of the wheel an amount of money, or something else. Go round the room and challenge each player to answer a question, with the difficulty of that question depending on the amount of money the wheel lands on.
- Christmas Truth or Dare - This one's a lot more fun when you have no control over whether you get a truth or a dare.
- Random Letters - Choose letters at random. Could be the basis of a fun game. I dunno - use your imagination!
Idea #6 - Origami Christmas Tree + Other Crafts
There's nothing to dislike about making an adorable paper Christmas tree: no fuss, no mess and no money to spend.
Simply tell everyone to grab a sheet of A4 paper (coloured or origami paper if they have it) and follow the instructions in the video below:
Once you've got a virtual forest of multi-coloured fir trees, you can make other cute Christmas crafts and show them all off together. Here are a few ideas:
Again, you can use Sync Video to make sure everyone at your virtual Christmas party is following the steps of these videos at the same pace.
Idea #7 - Make a Christmas Present(ation)
Been quizzing since the start of lockdown began? Try mixing it up by getting your guests to make their own presentation on something unique and festive.
Before the day of your virtual Christmas party, either assign at random (maybe using this spinner wheel) or let everyone choose a Christmas topic. Give them a set number of slides to work with and the promise of bonus points for creativity and hilarity.
When it's party time, each person presents an interesting/hilarious/wacky presentation. Optionally, get everyone to vote on their favourite and give prizes to the best!
A few Christmas present(ation) ideas...
- The worst Christmas movie of all time.
- Some pretty nuts Christmas traditions around the world.
- Why Santa needs to start obeying animal protection law.
- Have candy canes become too curvy?
- Why Christmas should be renamed to The Festivities of Iced Sky Tears
In our opinion, the more insane the topic, the better.
Any of your guests can make a really gripping presentation for free using AhaSlides. Alternatively, they can easily make it on PowerPoint or Google Slides and embed it in AhaSlides in order to utilise live polls, quizzes and Q&A features in their creative presentations!
Idea #8 - Christmas Card Competition
Speaking of creative virtual Christmas party ideas, this one can get some serious laughs.
Before the party, invite your guests to try and make the best/funniest Christmas card they can. It can be as elaborate or simple as they like and can include pretty much anything.
Pretty much no graphic design skills are necessary for this one as there are some great, free tools out there:
- Canva - A tool that gives you heaps of templates, backgrounds, Christmas icons and Christmassy fonts to make a Christmas card within minutes.
- PhotoScissors - A tool that helps you cut faces out of photos super easily and download them for use in Canva.
As you can maybe tell, we made the above image in about 3 minutes using both tools. We're sure that you and your party guests can do a better job in just as quick an amount of time!
Get your guests to present their crafted creations during your virtual Christmas party. If you want to turn up the heat, you can promise prizes for the top-voted answers.
Idea #9 - Wrapping Paper Recreations
Ever watched a kid have more fun with wrapping paper or a cardbox box than with the gift contained within? Well, that kid could be you in Wrapping Paper Recreations!
In this one, each player gets given or chooses a well-known movie. They then have to recreate a famous scene from that movie using mounds of used wrapping paper from opened presents.
Recreations can be 2D artworks or 3D sculptures, but must use nothing other than wrapping paper and traditional wrapping tools (scissors, glue and tape).
Make it competitive and offer a prize to the most highly voted recreation!
Idea #10 - Christmas Cookie-off
Laptops in kitchens guys; time to make some really simple Christmas cookies together!
Christmas Cookie-off is a great compromise for the fact that we're all eating socially distanced meals this year. It's a virtual Christmas party activity that challenges cooking and artistry skills in equal measure.
Most simple cookie recipes only require ingredients and equipment already in the average house. They take about 10 minutes to cook and are a wonderfully social way to stay connected during the party.
This particular recipe amplifies the fun with a simple icing design in the shape of emojis. You can get everyone to recreate their favourite emojis and have a poll for whose is the best at the end!
Idea #11 - Online Christmas Parlour Games
As Victorian Britain gave the world so many aspects of the Christmas we know today, it's only right to honour the era through Victorian-style parlour games (with a modern twist).
Parlour games have enjoyed a huge resurgence in recent years. Why? Well, many of them are easily adaptable to the confines of pretty much any online setting, including a virtual Christmas party.
Here are a few that are great for family, friends or colleagues...
- Fictionary - Read out a strange word and get each guest to take a stab at what it means. Display all the answers in an open-ended slide and then ask everyone to vote for which answer was most likely to be correct and which answer is the funniest. Give 1 point to the highest voted in each category and another point to anyone who actually got the right answer. (See the GIF above for how to do this for free on AhaSlides).
- Charades - Perhaps the parlour game is Charades. You know how this one works, so it should come as no surprise that it works just as well during a virtual Christmas party!
- Pictionary - This old classic now has a modern twist. Drawful 2 lets you take pictionary online and even removes the pain of trying to think up images to draw. Simply download the game, invite everyone to your room and draw the hilariously obscure picture concepts as best you can.
Note that Drawful 2 is a paid game. Of course, you can just do regular pictionary on paper if you don't want to fork out the $5.99.
👊 Protip: Want more ideas like these? Branch out from Christmas and check out our mega list of 30 totally free virtual party ideas. These ideas work fantastically online at any time of year, demand little preparation and don't require you to spend a penny!
The All-in-One + Free Tool for a Virtual Christmas Party
No matter if it's an ice breaker, a Christmas quiz, a presentation or a live round of voting you're looking to include in your virtual Christmas party, AhaSlides has you covered.
AhaSlides is a completely free and super simple tool to take your virtual Christmas party to the next level. You can use it to make or enhance most of the ideas we mentioned above by adding a lightly competitive factor to your party!
