The No-Drama, Stress-Free, Delegate-Everything Guide to the Holidays
Is it about now when you hit peak seasonal anxiety? Or do you tend to succumb in mid-December, just as the in-laws descend? Do holiday tipping, ham glazing, and hunting down the perfect present for your partner leave you exhausted? Does it help, when you’re up at midnight planning menus for visiting vegans, celiacs, and intermittent fasters, if your family asks why you’re so stressed? Is your wilting tree becoming an awkward metaphor for your feelings of personal inadequacy? Do you suspect that the mandate to Have Fun and Make Memories this time of year was the work of a sadist?
The annual attempt to deliver a flawless holiday season can too easily resemble a Greek tragedy in which the protagonist is crushed by inexorable fate. But actually, no one loves a martyr. So do yourself a favor and make an early New Year’s resolution to embrace the life-changing magic of delegation before it all rolls around again next December. Here’s how to outsource your way to holiday happiness in 2024.
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Staff Up
The dream is a staffing infrastructure that runs like a well-oiled machine while you kick back and sip eggnog. To achieve this nirvana, recruit the troops for Operation Jingle Bells (staff often use military code names) early in the year and make sure they’re up for the Tom Wambsgans role of collective pain sponge. Not only will a good house or estate manager absorb the holiday stress so you don’t have to, they’ll also conceal the exertion it costs them.
The work is “more than the family probably realizes,” says Anita Rogers, CEO of British American Household Staffing (BAHS), a leading agency that places recruits globally. But it’s “done so smoothly and seamlessly that it all feels very easy for the principals when they just slot into this fabulous party time.”
The house manager’s remit includes “transforming homes into holiday paradises,” says Seth Norman Greenberg, vice president of Pavillion Agency, a 60-year-old household-staffing firm based in New York. As well as organizing parties, gifts, and cards, they will also dispense tips. “Not only the doorman and the porters,” says Greenberg, but “certain maître d’s, garage attendants, the nannies, the teachers, the swim teacher, the chess teacher, whoever.”
A manager will maintain a fully stocked gift closet and track down important presents like a hunter stalking big game. Estate-management consultant Kristen Reyes recalls “a nightmare” negotiation with Steinway to hasten production of a “$200,000 custom-made piano” for a Christmas gift. The attitude to clients must always be “We’ll get it done,” she says.
Having a full staff also means you can alter your vacation plans at the last moment. “One minute, they’re going to go to Tahiti, and then the next [they] want to go skiing,” says Reyes. “Sometimes we’ll book multiple places [in case] they change their mind.”
Reyes says her clients range from tech moguls to those with generational wealth, but all share a seasonal philosophy of parceling out the tasks.
Minor seasonal afflictions, such as the daily placement of the Elf on the Shelf, can easily be delegated. Nearly all of Reyes’s clients outsource this opportunity for parent-child bonding: “I’ll move it, and then it’s a WhatsApp to the parent, like, ‘FYI, this is where the elf is hiding today.’ ”
Uplifting Gifting
Perhaps no seasonal task is as wearisome as plodding through someone else’s gift list. An appointment at a luxury department store can take the edge off. At Bergdorf Goodman, the bartender in the private personal-shopping suite will have your favorite cocktail waiting while Santa’s little helpers track down every last item on your roster. “We pride ourselves on never saying ‘no’ to clients,” says Melissa Xides, the store’s chief retail officer.
If you prefer to cede total creative control or require something that’s trickier to source, you need a specialist. Gab Waller, a Los Angeles–based personal shopper who tracks down sold-out designer items for clients including Hailey Bieber and Khloé Kardashian, says her Instagram fills up every November with DMs from men—most of whom are partners of her female clients—asking for advice on what to buy the women in their lives.
Waller, who charges a flat finder’s fee of $220 to $330 depending on the price of the item, enlightens this male clientele on “what their partner has purchased in the past, whether it’s a particular brand or a particular style,” from Hermès bags to Ugg boots, and offers guidance on sizing and trends. “You don’t have to go scrolling through websites, or talking to sales assistants—we do that,” she says. “The service that I offer truly is the ultimate time-saving way of shopping.”
A high-end concierge such as Pure Entertainment Group will also obtain “hard-to-find exotic-skin handbags, VIP tickets to sold-out events, limited-edition [artworks], whiskeys, or watches,” says Teneisha Collins, the group’s director of client relations. The company typically charges members a 15 percent fee; non-members pay 25 percent.
Personal shoppers will also wrap and ship gifts, but if you wish to elevate your present presentation to the level of art installation, you can book your very own wrap star. For between $500 and “a few thousand dollars,” Mia Canada’s Atlanta-based “giftscaping” company, That’s a Wrap, will create a personalized display based on memories and anecdotes from the gift giver. “I tell stories with my wrapping,” she says.
Past creations include a stack of gifts in the shape of Curious George for an adult devotee of the cartoon monkey. An arborist client had all of his gifts encased in wood: “We made a pair of pants look like a log, we created an axe, we put little wood creatures on there, covered it in moss, there were branches, we had owls.”
Bookings start in October, for clients hosting Thanksgiving who want a tree surrounded by prop packages. One all-night wrapping job finished on Christmas morning: “The kids heard us downstairs, so we shook little bells on our way out to make them think that it was Santa leaving.”
Canada spends December 25 recovering. “Then we will take a trip the day after to start our Kwanzaa celebrations,” for which Canada wraps family gifts in reusable African fabrics.
Avoid Finicky Admin
First up is the holiday-card list. The go-to calligrapher is Bernard Maisner, whose clients fly him first class around the country for consultations. “Some people take their stationery very seriously,” he says. For $50 to $100 per recipient, Maisner creates an ornate, custom design and hand-drawn calligraphic message, which is then printed using the intaglio process—“essentially the same method as a Rembrandt etching,” he says. Maisner’s fine-stationery studio will also mail the cards in gorgeously lined hand-addressed envelopes and even “forge” your signature (a common request).
If all this sounds overly arduous, a personal assistant can handle the heavy lifting. The holiday-card list is a year-round project, notes estate-management consultant Reyes. A client will say, “Here’s somebody I met; put them on the holiday list.”
For family-photo cards, your PA will need to book a photographer and stage an out-of-season wintery backdrop by October at the latest. Reyes also sometimes arranges a second photo shoot once the house is decorated, with the family posing by their gifts, so that no one has to worry about photography on the actual holidays.
And don’t wait to delegate the planning for that post-holiday-recovery vacation. Ashley Isaacs Ganz, CEO of luxury-travel company Artisans of Leisure, says her “very discerning” clients don’t want to collapse on a St. Barts sun lounger, instead preferring adventures around Egypt, Japan, Patagonia, and Australia, plus “black-tie New Year’s Eve galas in Scotland, the northern lights in Scandinavia.”
For a trip starting at $25,000 per person, your most idiosyncratic contract rider will be indulged. “One client had us purchase leather reclining chairs for every hotel room where he stayed in Greece, including on very remote islands,” says Ganz. “Another had us deliver his favorite cigars to each hotel in China. Another requires that each bathroom have a specific wattage of light bulb.”
Home Decorating: A Hands-Off Guide
Lay down your gnomes and dreidels and let Erin Swift, founder and creative director of specialty-design agency Holiday Workroom, take up the festive burden. Her clients, whose budgets have ranged from $1,500 to $30,000, often call her surprisingly late in the game. “The day after Thanksgiving is the day,” she says. “More and more over the years, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, the New Year—they all mesh together. November 15 to January 15 is the holiday season.”
A typical commission came from a couple who visit their New York abode only in December. “And what they want when they get there is for their home to be fully decorated and for the presents to be wrapped,” Swift says, “[so they can] enjoy their time with their family.”
But don’t feel you have to go vanilla. Some of her more unusual requests include an art collector who initially specified “a whole tree decorated in baby Jesuses” but eventually chose “a 10-foot tree full of Hermès-orange butterflies” and the high-profile political client who wanted a kitschy Christmas “that you imagine from the ’80s” (apparently without irony). This client “had her own decorations, but she wanted us to do the whole thing” in time for the family’s return to New York from out of state. Swift was asked to search the empty house—including rummaging through the husband’s underwear drawer—to track down the dispersed stash of adornments.
Matilda Diaz, the founder of event-design company Noble Diaz, who has worked with Chanel, Hermès, and Dior, says for Hanukkah, blue predominates and “we go heavy on the candles rather than the more traditional Christmas greenery. For example, a stair garland for Christmas might be beautiful swags of fir tied with velvet ribbons, but for Hanukkah we might do a fun, giant, blue-felt-ball garland instead.”
Some clients go big—really big. She recalls “one install [that] involved 68 trees, 650 feet of garlands, and 26 wreaths.” Diaz regularly provides 16-foot- tall trees that require 5,000 lights. That’s a lot of under-tree real estate: Time to open the gift closet.
No-Prep Parties
When it comes to festive entertaining, the sheer number of moving parts means it’s best to let someone else have a nervous breakdown while you play relaxed host. “The planning process can be overwhelming,” says Collins of Pure Entertainment Group. Her crew will handle “all the minute details, including managing guest lists, invitations, party favors, caterers, entertainment, and more.”
To avoid a Champagne-fueled stampede in your home, move the festivities to a rental mansion. Collins recalls a holiday party where her team “consulted with realtors, flew out to Malibu to visit the properties, sourced the caterers and equipment rental, booked guest accommodations, and liaised with their celebrity musical guest.”
The traditions of the season mean most people like to entertain at home, though in New York the preference is usually “to have a cocktail party from six to eight and then go out to dinner,” says Edouard Massih, owner of Edy’s Grocer, which specializes in modish grazing tables exploding with precisely fanned charcuterie, Dionysian grape clusters, and oozing cheeses festooned with pomegranate seeds. Massih bemoans the fact that at such parties, for which the budget is typically $8,000 to $10,000 for 30 to 50 people, the food is more embellishment than actual sustenance.
The best party planners will act like an orchestra conductor, coaxing multiple discordant parts into one harmonious whole. The key is choosing a design signature and weaving it into every detail, “from the invite to the trim on custom cocktail napkins that are sewn for the event,” says Joseph Augello, whose company JSA Studio NYC specializes in parties for the city’s elite, as well as “florals, candles, serving trays, food vessels, everything.” Such micromanaged intentional design creates, ironically, an impression of effortlessness, he says, leaves guests trying to “figure out why the party is so fabulous.”
One crucial decision remains: whether to try to pass off all this “easy” perfectionism as your own work. Swift says her clients do, and that makes her proud. “That’s the point,” she says. “It’s for you to enjoy the part of the holidays that is supposed to be special, which is friends and family. It is not schlepping a tree up the elevator.” She adds, “You can’t outsource spending time with your family, but you can outsource any type of labor.”
When it comes to the holidays, if you can name it, you can delegate it.
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