Alcohol free Christmas party ideas that still feel like a party

15 August 2026 · 5 min

The julefrokost is the one Danish party where the drinks get decided before anyone has looked at the food. Someone counts the snaps, someone else works out the beer, and the menu turns up afterwards as a formality.

Take the alcohol out and the party has to be planned differently, which is the opportunity rather than the problem. An alcohol free julefrokost needs three things: a clear drinks decision, something worth pouring, and an evening with a spine of its own.

Why the office is asking for it

The reasons are ordinary and most workplaces already contain several of them. Colleagues who are pregnant, colleagues who drive in from Tårnby or further out, colleagues who do not drink for religious reasons, colleagues in recovery, colleagues on medication, and colleagues who would rather not spend a Saturday recovering from a Friday.

None of that is new. What has changed is that the party gets planned for the whole invitation list instead of for the half of it that drinks. The colleague who was going to nurse one warm cola all evening is the colleague who used to leave at half past eight.

Say it plainly on the invitation, too. Written down, an alcohol free julefrokost reads as a decision. Discovered on the night, it reads as a cut.

Three drink choices, and none of them is a compromise

Here the answer is unusually simple. There are three options, and each is a whole choice rather than a shade of the same one.

• No drinks at all. The right answer more often than people expect, especially for a lunch or an early evening that ends before eight. Water on the table, coffee with the dessert, nobody keeping a tab in their head.
• Soft drinks. We serve them, so nothing arrives in anybody's car boot and nobody is counting bottles at the end. This is the usual choice for a company party that runs into the evening.
• Bring your own, against a small corkage. Usually thought of as the alcohol option, and for an alcohol free party it is the most useful of the three. Your own crates of alcohol free beer, cider, sparkling apple, whatever your colleagues actually like, brought in and served properly.

That third one is worth reading twice. Bring your own is not a licence to bring beer, it is a licence to bring the drinks you want, so an office that has been arguing about thin alcohol free options elsewhere can simply buy the ones it likes. The shape of the corkage sits on our prices page with the rest.

What actually goes in the glass

The failure mode of an alcohol free party is not the absence of alcohol. It is a table with nothing on it but cola and tap water, which tells every guest exactly how much thought went in.

Fix it with three things: something hot, something sharp, and something that looks like an occasion.

• Something hot on arrival, since guests come in from a December evening with cold hands. Alcohol free gløgg with almonds and raisins does the whole job of a welcome drink.
• Something sharp to drink with the food. Sparkling water with lime, a dry alcohol free beer, cold apple juice with a slice of ginger. Sweetness is what tires a room out over three hours, so keep one option that is not sweet.
• Something that looks like a toast. Alcohol free sparkling in a proper glass as the speeches start. Half the ritual of a skål is the glass and the timing, not what is in it.

The food does more work here than people expect. Our kitchen is Maiya Nepali Kitchen and it sits inside the building, so a December menu can be built on momo, the steamed dumplings served with achar, and sekuwa, the charcoal grilled marinated meat from the eastern hills of Nepal. Food with that much going on in it holds the table on its own, and the heat lives in the achar alongside rather than cooked into everything, so each guest sets their own level. Any menu can be made fully vegetarian. The catering page sets out how the menus work.

Build the evening on something other than the bar

At a drinking julefrokost the alcohol supplies the structure. Remove it and you need a running order, which is honestly what most Christmas parties needed anyway.

• Start with food rather than an hour of standing around. A seated start at six, or a buffet open at six, gives the room its shape immediately.
• Put something on the projector. Photographs from the year, a quiz about the department, the worst screenshots from the group chat. The hall fee already covers the projector, the sound system and the decoration, so this costs preparation rather than equipment.
• Give the evening one fixed event around nine: a prize, a speech, the first song. People stay when something is still coming.
• Agree the finish time when you book and put it on the invitation. An alcohol free party tends to end when it says it will, which colleagues with children quietly appreciate.

Our hall is a single room for 30 to 120 guests, which matters more without a bar to drift towards: everyone stays in one conversation, and a quiz or a speech reaches every table without a microphone. What a December booking includes is set out on the Christmas party venue page, and the rest of the year sits on the corporate events page.

Everyone drives, and that changes the practicalities

This is the part that sells an alcohol free julefrokost to the people organising it. When nobody is drinking, most of the room arrives by car, and in Copenhagen in December that is usually where the evening starts going wrong.

We are at Højdevej 59 in Sundbyøster on Amager, and parking on site is free, which is worth putting in the invitation itself. Nobody circles the block in the rain looking for a space, and the designated driver is not the one who paid for the evening. Colleagues coming from the city have line 8A stopping roughly two minutes from our door, and the M2 metro runs around the clock.

Send us the date, a rough headcount and which of the three drink choices you want, and we will tell you what December still has open. Our number is +45 21 95 92 92 and the address for an email is info@maiya.dk. Better still, book a visit and stand in the room first.