5 Festive Christmas date ideas

Don’t let Christmas stress stop you from spending time with your partner. How you spend your days now really sets the scene for how you’ll be together next year, too.

You don’t need to live life like you’re trapped in a Richard Curtis movie, but the occasional boost of festive fun can really bring you together as a team.

Here are my five favourite ways to have festive fun with the one you love most.

Even if shopping is one of your favourite hobbies, Christmas duty-shopping can really suck the joy out of hearing the words, “Please enter your pin.” So you might not believe that visiting a shopping mall together at this time of year would be any kind of date. But actually, shopping together is a strange, yet proven, way to bolster your relationship.

A US study took data from the National Study of Families and Households results from1945 through to 2006 and noticed that sharing chores was a common theme among long-lasting marriages. Specific chores.

For women, marital satisfaction was at its highest when the couple shared washing the dishes. But for men, marital happiness was highest when the couple shared the shopping. Yes! Even if every man we see in a shopping centre looks like he’s fantasising about throwing himself off the escalator, inside he’s blissful. So hit the high streets as a team. Or snuggle up on your laptop together and make “add to cart” your new love motto.

December is a difficult time to connect with a partner in the evenings. You’re either already booked, don’t fancy trekking out in the dark and rain, or every restaurant finds you seated next to a local business’s Christmas party. Awkward. So don’t even try. Instead, opt for the more glamorous, easier option: lunch.

Book a cosy table for two somewhere you’d never afford in the evening. Take the afternoon off work, and linger over your food. (Bonus points if you book a room in a nearby hotel.)

Not sure where to go? Pick somewhere from the 50 most romantic restaurants in the UK.

If you think of Christmas, you don’t always think of passionate sex. Christmas Day finds most of us distended on the sofa bitterly regretting that 17th mince pie and Boxing Day is a bloated write-off spent searching for receipts. But there is one very sexy day hiding among the festive season: Christmas Eve.

Online erotic retailer LoveHoney ran a survey and discovered that 60 per cent of couples make love on the night before Christmas, and 58 per cent on New Year’s Eve. I know you’re not someone who likes to follow the crowd, but this could be a great tradition in your own relationship.

Buy your partner a Christmas Eve stocking, and fill it with fun, sexy gifts, like naughty toys, lingerie, a mini-book of sex positions, or a saucy board game, like Nookii.

Turn off the TV, and cosy up together instead.

Oh come, all ye faithful, and join a carol-singing evening at your local church or village hall. It could boost your health, and your happiness. Studies have shown that group singing lowers stress, raises feel-good endorphins, and even boosts your immune system.

As a date, it’s perfect. Singing together lowers your inhibitions, and gives you a chance to relax and have fun with each other. Can’t find a choir? Belt out your tunes together at home with a karaoke machine like this one.

Bonus points for this one if you sing songs that you heard early on in your relationship. Emotions are closely linked to memory in the brain, so you could be bringing back that loving feeling with every line.

An easy way to kickstart the festive feels is to simply recreate the first date you ever went on together.

This is a fun, simple way to strengthen your relationship’s Love Map—that’s marriage expert John Gottman’s phrase for the positive memories that happy couples share.

Take your partner back to the first venue, at the same time of day, and order the same food and drink. (Bonus points if you can fit into the same outfit.) If your first date was a cinema date, consider splurging on hiring out the cinema so you can have the whole room to yourselves.

If you can’t recreate that first date perfectly, pick another memorable event from your time together—the first meal you cooked for each other, or a particularly steamy night in.

During the evening, steer the conversations round to reminiscing about the best parts of your life together. These conversations help you get over recent troubles, and to see things more positively. Or do what John Gottman and his wife (of 30 years) Julie do on their annual honeymoon every year, and ask each other the same three questions:

That way, you can problem-solve together and plan new fun goals. And you can be sure that you’re entering 2020 as a united team.

Have fun!