Merry Matesmas! The Evening Standard's feature team on how they spend Christmas with friends

Before the long-lost relatives start getting in the way, this weekend is the last chance to have your mates over for a Christmas knees-up. The Standard’s features team share their tips on how they’re celebrating this year.

Nothing shows your friends and family you love them like taking them up the Shard for a cocktail reception, as the city’s lights twinkle beneath you. Especially when you’re throwing a double-whammy celebration: Christmas, plus my sister Alice’s hen do. Luckily, the venue was more than up to the task at hand: a breathtaking 34 floors up London’s tallest building (literally: there’s less oxygen up there), in the Shangri-La hotel’s Yi reception room, which has ample room for 15 to enjoy Old Fashioneds, potent Martinis and Kir Royals. After a few rounds, we hoovered up canapés — the menu includes creamy avocado and chilli crostini, seared tuna with sesame and wasabi, and beef carpaccio with quail’s egg — and tried not to get vertigo.

Lucy Hunter-Johnston

Turkey? For Christmas? You’ve got to be kidding. While our parents and grandparents might persist in trying to get us to eat meat — OK, Boomers — at a millennial Christmas, the menu is exclusively plant-based (a few remaining meat eaters were given short shrift in the group WhatsApp for even mooting a meat course). My friendship group has one standout chef (all hail), who very kindly volunteered to host in New Cross, preparing an extraordinary feast, starring a veggie suet pie as the centrepiece, a pomegranate salad and a very (very) gin-soaked pudding that had half the room reeling — which wasn’t great preparation for our annual after-dinner Christmas quiz.

Phoebe Luckhurst

Forget the tree — the centrepiece of my Christmas party is a well-stocked cocktail bar. Namely because the best one in town happens to reside in my living room. It comes courtesy of John Lewis’s collaboration with Swoon, which has gifted lounge-loving revellers with the marble-clad cocktail trolley of dreams.

As for the stocking, why rely on friends bringing lukewarm Buck’s Fizz when you can recruit Liquorette, which delivers cocktails to your door within the hour? Of course, a crate of Negronis and 30 empty stomachs is not a winning combo. Throw a few Christmas Tree Martinis into the mix and even the simple task of not burning the vegan pigs in blankets becomes impossible.

Thankfully, there’s Peardrop, the capital’s canapé caterers extraordinaire. Its Moveable Feasts packages include a cornucopia of Christmas treats, delivered in biodegradable boxes. Canapés come savoury or sweet — think smoked salmon beetroot blinis in the former, and chocolate dipped candied clementines in the latter. There’s also sausage roll boxes — including vegan squashage roll option — and luxury platters loaded with cheese, chutney and mince pies galore, plus the pièce de résistance, the pavlova wreath. Ding dong.

(Canapés from £15 per head, peardroplondon.com; cocktails from £18 for two, liquorette.co.uk)

Emma McCarthy

Cooking for 24 requires military timing — and quantities. Impressive as some of my friends’ flats are, no London twenty-something has an oven to cater for turkey of those proportions: turkey chilli, therefore, is our annual ritual.

Preparations start early (the beauty of a chilli is you can get started the night before) which leaves room for last-minute details: novelty crackers, mulled wine, cheese-and-pineapple sticks and honeyed pigs in blankets. By the time seconds are offered, most of us are too stuffed, or leaving room for cheese — luckily chilli is a freezer favourite. Turkey lunch it is for the rest of December.

Katie Strick

If I had my way, the Christmas party would be easy: once everyone turned up at the flat we’d march them over the road and let the pub’s baffled staff deal with it all. Still, I’m told that’s not the done thing, so we stay put and stick to a few good rules: no one likes a dress code, mezcal is mandatory, and the cheapest wine should only be served if everyone’s wobbly. The 25-minute remix of Last Christmas is a (hilarious) lifesaver if there’s no time for a playlist, too. Still, we always start early enough so that, once we’ve drunk the flat dry, the pub’s still open anyway.

David Ellis