I’m a Smart-Home Writer and This Is How I’m Automating My Holiday Parties

It’s that time of year when calendars are full of Friendsgiving events and white elephant parties. If you’re looking for holiday party ideas that will actually make hosting and enjoying your next holiday party easier, this is the guide for you. It’s no small task to host a great party, and as a deeply type B person who’s more likely to make another Partiful invite than she is to start cooking a recipe on time, I’m always looking for ways to streamline my hosting.

In the spirit of a WIRED-style holiday, I’m automating everything I can this holiday season for every party I attend and host. I’ll be testing everything from smart home gadgets like smart light bulbs and smart locks to fun party accessories like a portable photo booth and cocktail-making machine all season long. Here’s everything I’ve tried to automate so far with great success, and everything I’ll be trying at my next parties.

Looking for more holiday season advice? We’ve got a holiday hosting package called Dedicated Server, full of practical advice and guides like the Best Smart Christmas Lights, Best Advent Calendars, Best Fake Christmas Trees, Best White Elephant Gifts, and Best Permanent Outdoor Lights.

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How to Automate Party Decor

A friend once told me something I’ve never forgotten: “You seem like a crafty person, but you actually aren’t crafty at all.” She’s right. I have a good eye for design, but I’m not particularly good at making things. My best handiwork is my smart lock installations and digital craftsmanship, like fun holiday cards I can design on tools like Canva. Anything else that needs to be made by hand is better left to someone who isn’t me.

That digital design skill can come to life with the help of a vinyl cutter like Cricut. I had a vision to turn a happy birthday banner into a “Soup-giving” banner for my soup-themed Friendsgiving day, and I was able to easily pull up the Cricut app, choose a font that spoke to my party vibe, and instantly print it out and stick it onto the backs of the banner for a whole new look. It was easy and painless once I figured out what size I wanted, and I pulled this off with the newer Cricut Explore 4 ($229), which made my letters in seconds. WIRED reviewer Kat Merck has and loves the less expensive Cricut Joy Xtra ($149), with which she can create stickers and iron-on decals from designs she uploads. The vinyl can go on all kinds of things, from posters to cups, letting you get as specific with your decor as you want without any heavy lifting.

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How to Automate Pre-Party Cleaning

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The biggest lift before a party? Cleaning the house. I have a preschooler who gets sand, leaves, and shredded cheese everywhere he goes, so there’s always a lot of cleaning to be done before my home feels habitable. (Or livable without wearing the thickest house slippers I can find.) While I can’t automate away the Hansel and Gretel-like trails of snacks off the couch, there is an automation that can help me with the floors: a robot vacuum.

I’m currently testing the Narwal Flow Robot Vacuum and Mop ($1,500) for our guide to the Best Robot Vacuums, but any robot vacuum and mop we recommend can help with this task. Just turn it on and let it work; I let the Narwal vacuum and mop while I installed a light strip around my kitchen island and printed out letter decoration with my Cricut. I especially like the vac-mop combos since my home is almost entirely hard flooring—nothing feels as good as my floors after a good vacuuming sesh followed by a mop job. It does take the main floor of my house the better part of two hours to get fully vacuumed and mopped, so make sure to do this well ahead of party time. But I can confirm the Narwal was able to make the crazy amount of crumbs and dried-up Play-Doh disappear from my floors; just make sure to move things like chairs or toddler towers out of the way of particularly messy spots that you want to make sure the vacuum can deep clean without any furniture legs blocking the way. The Narwal didn’t get stuck on any furniture I left out, though, which was nice to see. If you’re looking for something more affordable and don’t mind missing out on a mop, a great affordable robot vacuum is the G10+ robot vacuum.

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How to Automate Your Ambience

[smart lights photo]

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Ambience is a key party factor. I’m an inveterate hater of The Big Light, as nothing is less of a vibe than turning on a light so bright you feel like you’re trapped in a fluorescent classroom. Certainly not the holiday party ambience you want, let alone the vibe I like when I’m just playing Hades 2 at the end of the day.

The solution is layered lighting, bringing lighting options at various eye levels that aren’t insanely bright but instead distribute light nicely throughout the room. The best way to do that is with a combination of smart lights and light strips, as you’ll see in the TikTok above. These are such a great way to perfect your lighting since you can choose the right shade of white, or choose colorful holiday scenes or just colors you like. I really like GE Cync’s lights, especially since both the light strips ($36 for 16 inches) and light bulbs ($35 for two) can sync to music using a built-in microphone. The microphone is at the base of the light strips, so place your speaker accordingly.

Cync’s indoor light strip and kitchen cabinet lights ($52 for three), which I installed in my kitchen, introduce a beautiful, layered lighting look. My personal go-to for a cozy feel is the Candle Light Show you’ll find in Cync’s presets. It glows and flickers in shades of warm yellow and orange, but there are also light shows themed to the Christmas holidays, fireworks, and a winter aurora. You can also set up for the lights to turn on at certain times of day to automate your home brightening as the party goes into the evening.

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How to Automate Answering Your Door

Photograph: Nena Farrell

My biggest struggle when I’m hosting is answering the door. The entry to my home is on a separate lower floor than the rest of my house, and I have a young child and a gate to keep him upstairs, so answering the door is a multilayered effort to get past my child, the gate, and the stairs to finally reach the door. Luckily, I have just the smart home hack for this: a smart lock.

I can’t rave enough about how much smart locks have improved my daily life, including automating my parties. It’s not easy to check if the door’s locked when your anxious little mind starts wondering at 10 pm whether you left it unlocked, and it’s not any easier when you’re trying to entertain guests on the second floor while still letting people in on the bottom floor.

Instead, for my event, I gave my guests their own code to use to let themselves in. It was honestly such a relief not to have to jump the gate and run down the stairs every time someone arrived. I still had the Yale Assure Lock 2 Touch on my door for the party, but all of our smart lock picks let you add codes and even create temporary ones that will automatically expire after the party, so you don’t have to worry about someone trying to waltz back into your home later.

You can also use video doorbells to help you answer your door, or at least be alerted when someone’s arrived. I have a Ring doorbell that will make my Echo devices alert me when the doorbell is rung, which can be a nice solution if you don’t want people to let themselves in, but want to be able to see who’s at the door without leaving the kitchen. You can also set up your smart speaker to unlock your door with a voice command, though you’ll have to access the settings to specifically allow that—for security reasons, it doesn’t work by default.

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How to Automate Your Party Photography

[photo of photobooth]

I’m the designated Photo Friend. You know me, you love me, I took the pre-pandemic Facebook profile photo you still haven’t changed. If you’re the host and also the photo-inclined friend, it can be hard to juggle getting group pictures while also doing everything else you need to for the party.

There’s an automated solution, though. For my latest parties, I brought the HP Sprocket Photo Booth Machine ($600), and it was a hit. It’s a 21-inch-tall, portable photo booth that both automatically prints 3 x 4-inch pictures and lets you download digital versions via a QR code. I love that you can create events on the device and set up customized filters—mine had the word “Soupsgiving” on the bottom, though it was in an incredibly small font compared to the regular filter designs—and you can also add settings like how many prints of one picture guests can print. We left the default setting of two on for the soup-themed Friendsgiving, but I think I’ll bump it up to at least three for future gatherings. Make sure to stock up on HP’s Zink paper packs ($40 for 50) for the photo booth to print with, especially if it’s a big gathering. It will need both Wi-Fi access and a power outlet.

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How to Automate Your Appetizers

Feeding a crowd is hard. Feeding a crowd that includes some serious allergies and dietary restrictions doesn’t make it any easier. In the spirit of automating everything I could, I turned to ChatGPT to come up with my appetizer for a group that featured two vegetarians and someone whose allergies include avocado, beans, shellfish, and eggs. (Getting those two sets of friends their protein needs at the same time has a singular overlap in the Venn diagram of what they can all eat: tofu.)

ChatGPT did a good job brainstorming some possible options, and when I asked for a holiday angle, it came up with new options that were nice and seasonal. I chose to go with the lowest-lift option—pomegranate and ricotta crostini—but the baked brie bites were a big contender too. I was able to have this digital conversation and get the recipes all on ChatGPT’s free tier, but you can hit the paywall when you ask too many questions or ask things that need more research from the artificial intelligence.

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How to Automate Your Cooking

Fellow WIRED reviewer Matthew Korfhage is currently testing two different robots that will cook your dishes for you, but in the meantime, the closest I’ve found is the 10-in-1 Ninja Foodi PossibleCooker Pro ($119). You can choose from options ranging from sear and slow cook to sous vide and even bake. It turned my broccoli-cheddar soup experiment (I was on a quest to replicate my favorite Panera soup for Soupgiving) into a one-pot dish where I could sauté my onions, stir up my béchamel, and then mix in all my ingredients and let it simmer until done. It even comes with an integrated utensil.

It was really helpful to use in an already busy kitchen, and I imagine it would be indispensable for big, Thanksgiving-style dinners where the stove and oven are monopolized. While I still had to do the cooking, I was able to hang out in my own little spot and let the PossibleCooker help me. It has a timer in the front to help remind me how long I’ve been cooking on a setting, though I do wish there were a medium setting (your choices are low and high for the cooktop settings).

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Automate Your Food Disposal

There are a lot of food scraps when you’re cooking for events like Thanksgiving and holiday dinner parties. I really loved grabbing the canister from the FoodCycler and bringing it next to where we were cooking soups so everyone could throw their food scraps in as we went. When it’s full, just set it in the machine and it will grind-and-dry the scraps (or leftovers!) into a sort of nutrient-rich meal that can be mixed in with potting soil or sprinkled on your lawn. I have the new FoodCycler Eco 5, and WIRED reviewer Kat Merck recommends the FoodCycler Eco 3 as one of her favorite home food recyclers.

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What Else I’m Testing This Holiday Season

The holiday season is only just starting, and I’ll be testing more gadgets and gear all season long. Here’s some of what I’m testing next:

The Bartesian Cocktail Maker ($349): This cocktail maker promises to be the Keurig of cocktail machines, with capsules for cocktail mixes instead of coffee. You’ll need to bring your own liquor, but once you fill up the included containers with the liquid, the machine should be able to take it from there. I’ll be testing some of the fun holiday cocktails too.

Moen Align Smart Faucet ($554): If you’re tired of water splashing everywhere behind your sink, or wish it were easier to automate turning on your kitchen faucet or to measure the perfect amount of water for a recipe, Moen’s touchless smart faucet with voice control is the answer. It even connects to smart assistants like Alexa.

Pura 4 Smart Home Fragrance Diffuser ($50): I was hoping to try our favorite nebulizer from our guide to the Best Scent Diffusers for my soup-themed soiree, but my husband’s Hungarian goulash filled our whole home with its scent a full hour before the party even started. WIRED reviewer Kat Merck has multiple Puras and says they’re a great solution for areas with stale air, like my entry stairwell with no windows (but a lot of shoes).