The big holiday season will arrive before you know it. As we get into the 2nd week of December, many restaurants’ dining rooms are booked solid, the private room has three holiday parties on the calendar, and the New Year’s Eve prix fixe still exists only as a list on the chef’s phone (or worse, in their head). Someone prints it on office paper the morning of. It looks exactly like that, cheap and not in the spirit of the holidays.
Every restaurant knows the holidays are coming. Sadly, few plan their holiday menus on the same schedule as the food. Let’s do it right now — what to put on a holiday menu, what to print it on, and when each piece needs to be ready. Don’t waste more time debating it; just get it rolling.
Why the Holiday Menu Deserves Your Attention
Holiday Prix Fixe Menu Printing
The holidays are when restaurants see guests who don’t usually come in. In the National Restaurant Association’s most recent holiday survey, 63% of adults said they planned to eat out during the holiday weeks, and 48% planned to order takeout or delivery. Gen Z was the most likely group to let a restaurant handle a holiday meal, at 86%.
The group business is growing too. OpenTable reported that parties of six or more were up 8% year over year, and more than half of consumers said they planned to dine in groups over the holidays.
Those are the tables that decide your December: office parties, extended families, friends who only see each other once a year. Many of them are first-time guests. The holiday menu is the first thing they read, and often the thing they keep.
Prix Fixe, Special, or Full Holiday Menu — Pick One
Most restaurants drift into one of three formats without choosing. Choosing on purpose makes everything after it easier.
The insert or special sheet. Your regular menu stays; a single page lists a few holiday dishes and drinks. This is the lightest lift and the right call for casual restaurants, diners, and pizzerias that want a seasonal touch without retraining the kitchen.
The prix fixe. Most popular and common. This is the standard for big holiday days like Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve at full-service restaurants. For good reason: simplicity in the kitchen on very busy days, speeds up turnover on your busiest nights, and makes your per-diner revenue something you can forecast based on seats.
The party menu. A dedicated menu for private events and large groups, usually offered as two or three packages at different price points. This is the one most restaurants forget to have — and the one that brings in the most revenue per booking.
Many restaurants need two of these. A diner might run a holiday special sheet in the dining room and a party menu for the back room. A steakhouse might run a New Year’s Eve prix fixe and a party menu all December.
What Belongs on a Holiday Menu
The price, stated plainly. For a prix fixe, put the per-person price at the top, and say clearly what is and isn’t included — tax, gratuity, wine pairing, supplements. The National Restaurant Association has found that value weighs heavily on holiday decisions. Considering inflation and affordability today, this is an absolute must from a diner perspective: “yes, it’s the holidays, but we also want to get a good value for our dollars”. A clear price is part of that value. Surprises at the end of the meal are not.
- Choices at each course, but not too many. Two or three options per course is plenty. More than that and the kitchen loses the predictability that made prix fixe worth doing.
- Dietary and allergen notes. Holiday tables are large and mixed, and at least one guest will have a restriction. Mark vegetarian, gluten-free, and nut-containing dishes, and note that substitutions are available if they are. It saves your servers time on the busiest nights of the year.
- The date, clearly. A menu that says “New Year’s Eve 2026” becomes a keepsake. It also stops anyone from pulling last year’s card out of a drawer.
- Your next booking. The guest reading a holiday menu is often the person who plans the office party, the family reunion, or the anniversary. A line about private events or gift cards costs nothing and reaches exactly the right reader.
For the principles behind how guests actually read a menu — where the eye lands, how prices are perceived — see our post on restaurant menu design psychology.
Choosing What to Print On Today
A holiday menu has a different job than your everyday menu, and it should be printed accordingly.
Prix fixe and holiday dinners: heavyweight stock. These menus are used for one night or a few weeks, then retired. Durability matters less than presentation — and on New Year’s Eve, presentation is most of what you are selling. Our heavyweight menu paper is 65 lb cover, about the thickness of a business card, in gold, natural, and beige. The 524 natural linen is 80 lb cover with a textured finish, which is the one to reach for when the menu should feel formal. Each sheet prints on an inkjet printer, laser printer, or copier. We covered why stock matters so much at this level in fine dining heavyweight menu paper: why paper stock matters.
The cost is small. At the 1–3 pack rate, 8.5×11 heavyweight sheets are $25.95 per hundred — about 26 cents per menu. For a prix fixe night where the average check is well above normal, that is not where you save money.
Party menus and all-season holiday menus: waterproof stock. A party menu that gets handed out at every event from mid-November to New Year’s, or a holiday menu that stays on the tables for six weeks, gets a lot of handling. That one belongs on waterproof menu paper, which wipes clean and holds up through the season. For more on why it outperforms lamination, see how waterproof menu printing works.
Sizes. A single-page prix fixe fits comfortably on 8.5×11. A party menu with two or three packages usually wants 8.5×14 or an 11×17 folded card, so each option has room to breathe.
Test before the rush. If you have never printed on cover stock or linen, order a sample kit now and run a test sheet through your own printer. It is far better to find out in October that your printer needs a manual feed setting than to find out on December 30th.
A Working Timeline: Use It!
The dates are the same every year, yet holiday menus fail more often because of being late than because of bad design. Use this schedule, which works backward. This year in 2026, it’s all Thursdays: Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, and both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve also fall on Thursdays.
Late September to mid-October: decide. Choose your formats, set your prix fixe prices, and draft your party packages. Do party menus first, because event planners start booking in October. Work this out with your head chef sooner rather than later. New dishes? Repeat classics? Pricing will be based on the dishes so coordinate accordingly
- By late October: party menu printed. Put it on your website, hand it to anyone who asks about events, and leave copies at the hostess stand up front.
- Early November: Thanksgiving menu final. Final wording, final price, printed with at least a week to spare.
- Mid-November: December menus to print. Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve prix fixe menus, plus any holiday special sheet for the dining room. Printing both at once saves a second round of proofs in the busiest month of the year.
- Throughout: keep a buffer. Order 10-15% more than your expected covers. Menus get spilled on, taken home, and reprinted when the chef swaps a dish two days out. This is seasonal so you’re not going to worry about reusing the menus and can skip waterproof menu paper. But that means having extra on hand, so order more than you expect to use, as they will typically get used in those other ways.
Our post on how often a restaurant should update its menu covers how seasonal menus fit into a year-round printing schedule.
What It Means for You
The holiday season brings in guests who don’t usually come in, in bigger groups, spending more per head. The menu is what they read first and remember afterward. Planning it in October instead of December costs nothing extra — and it is the difference between a menu that looks like part of the event and one that looks like an afterthought.
Ready to plan yours? Browse our heavyweight menu paper and waterproof menu paper, order a sample kit to test on your printer, or contact us for printing and design help — send us your holiday menu, and we’ll handle the rest.