5 Ways to Save Time During Christmas and New Year Preparation

Christmas and New Year preparations force me to choose gifts, write greetings to relatives, and come up with recipes for festive dinners. This is just a small part of the end-of-year worries, which should ideally put me in a positive mood but often leaves me drained and exhausted. This year, I’ve started to actively use chatbots, and I’m realizing just how much they can help me during the festive season. How am I planning to use AI assistants like ChatGPT, ChatOn, or Gemini? Here are my ideas.

To choose customized gifts for my loved ones

Exchanging Christmas gifts is a wonderful tradition, but I often struggle to come up with the perfect presents for my husband or friends. We don’t use wishlists, so finding a useful and interesting gift may be a big challenge. Earlier, I would spend hours searching through recommendation lists on social media, but now I know that I can use an AI assistant to find the ideal present.

I gave this approach a try on my husband's birthday. All you need is to describe the person you’re searching the gift for, including their job, hobbies, favorite books, and daily habits. Also, you should ask the bot to give you ten or more ideas. Plus, you can define your budget if you wish. Some ideas may seem basic or have been used before, but you’re sure to find something inspirational.

To stop using standard well-wishes

Frankly speaking, I don’t understand how I wrote holiday greetings without AI. After wishing for happiness, health, and dreams coming true, my imagination usually stopped working. One of the solutions was to search the internet and copy relevant text, but those greetings lacked personal touch. Now, with AI bots, I can get unique well-wishes in seconds, having the opportunity to customize them without extra mental effort. For instance, ChatOn allows you to choose the tone and size of your text to help you stay original and personal.

To find delicious low-effort recipes

Festive dinner preparation is a pain for me for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t like cooking and searching for new, unusual recipes. Secondly, despite the first reason, I still want to impress my guests without spending hours in the kitchen. As you might guess, this is a good example when asking chatbots is the best solution. Describe your occasion, preferred ingredients, and your cooking skills, and the bot will offer you relevant recipes. The last unusual dish I made with an AI assistant's help was a cranberry chicken bake—and it was tasty.

To entertain guests with a new game

If you’re great at choosing fun and memorable games for guests, you might be a professional event planner. But if you're like me, you’re likely to spend a lot of time searching for non-banal, easy games on the internet. I was surprised and grateful to AI assistants for their ideas, such as organizing the “Resolution Guessing Game,” where each guest writes down their NY resolutions on a piece of paper, and after that, everyone takes turns guessing who wrote it.

To find the best movies matching my mood

To create a festive mood, I like watching movies where the plot is based around a love story, New Year’s time, miracles, or Christmas expectations. I have a list of my favorites, where the top places are Bridget Jones's Diary, The Holiday, and Real Love. But when I wanted to watch something new, I needed to search the internet and read a lot of similar listicles. Now you can just ask an AI assistant for movie recommendations, excluding some films and asking for suggestions similar to your favorites. This way, you'll end up with plenty of options beyond the usual ones from Netflix or Apple TV.

I hope these tips and my experience help anyone feeling overwhelmed by holiday preparations. New technologies can save us time, reduce stress, and help us stay in a good mood.