Hosting Christmas with family staying for a few days? This spreadsheet keeps the whole stretch in one place: every houseguest meal from Dec 23 to Dec 27, the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day menu, when each dish has to start, whether everything fits in your oven, and what to buy.

What you get (one zip file):

• The planner spreadsheet (.xlsx), BLANK and SAMPLE versions

• A 3-page PDF guide in US Letter and A4: setup steps and a worked example

• A README and the font license

What the spreadsheet does:

• Settings: Christmas Day date (starts as Dec 25, 2026), serve times for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, adults, kids and child portion, number of ovens, racks per oven, °F or °C

• Houseguest Meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for Dec 23 to Dec 27, with how many eat, what you will serve and who cooks

• Menu: up to 20 dishes with course, who makes it, serve day, make-ahead day, and your own prep, cook and rest minutes and oven setting

• Timeline: start, into-oven and out-of-oven times counted back from the serve time (start = serve time − rest − cook − prep). Times show the day, so a dish that starts the night before is easy to spot

• Christmas Eve and Christmas Day run sheets: every dish for that meal in start order, ready to print and tick off

• Oven Check: flags dishes that are in your only oven at the same time at different settings, and moments when more dishes are in the oven than you have racks. With 2 or 3 ovens it tells you to use another oven instead. If a dish is baked the day before, set Uses oven? to No and Cook minutes to 0 on serving day, and put the bake date in Make-ahead day.

• Shopping List: scales each item to your servings (qty × servings ÷ recipe serves), with store section, a have-it column and buy-by dates; the Summary shows item counts by store section

• Summary: dish counts, first start times, oven warnings, meals planned and items still to buy

You type every cooking time and oven setting from your own recipes. The planner gives no cooking times, temperatures or food-handling advice. The SAMPLE file uses an invented family and made-up numbers only to show how the sheets work.

Lists accept only their listed values, and numbers and dates must be in range. The workbook does not use the computer’s clock.

Compatibility: Tested in LibreOffice Calc. Google Sheets not tested. Excel not tested.

The PDF guide was checked on screen; it has not been test-printed on paper. Every page keeps a white edge of at least 0.5 inch. Fonts are embedded.

This is a digital download; nothing will be shipped. All names in the SAMPLE file are invented.

License: personal use only. Please don’t resell or share the files.