What day of the week should the julefrokost be held?
27 August 2026 · 5 min
Ask a Copenhagen office when the julefrokost is and the answer is almost always a Friday in December. Nobody actually decided that. It is what the calendar has always done, and it gets repeated every year without anyone checking whether it still suits the people on the invitation list.
It is worth checking, because the weekday is the one decision that quietly settles who turns up. A menu can still be changed in November. A date cannot.
Why Friday became the default
Friday earns its place honestly. Nobody gives up a Saturday for work, nobody has to be sharp at a desk the next morning, and the party can run as long as it wants to run.
The trouble is that every other office in the city reached the same conclusion. In 2026 the season offers Friday 4, Friday 11 and Friday 18 December. The last of those falls in the week people start handing over their work and packing the car, so it is only nominally available. The whole city is really bidding for two evenings.
That costs you more than availability. When your colleagues are invited somewhere else on the same Friday, some arrive late from one party and some leave early for another, and the room never quite fills at the same moment. Our Christmas party venue page sets out what a December booking with us covers.
Who goes missing when you pick a Friday
Before choosing a day, work out who you would least like to lose. A Friday evening is expensive for three groups in particular.
- Parents of small children. An evening that starts at seven and finishes late costs a babysitter and the Saturday morning after it. Friday is also the evening most families use to land after the week.
- Colleagues on shift. Retail, care, transport and hospital rotas are hardest of all to swap on a Friday or a Saturday, which are precisely the two days a julefrokost normally takes.
- Part-time colleagues. Plenty of Danish workplaces have people who are simply not there on Fridays, and a Friday party asks them to come in on their day off.
None of that makes Friday wrong. It makes it a choice with a bill attached, and the bill is paid in empty chairs.
What a Thursday actually changes
A Thursday keeps the week, the season and the guest list exactly as they were. It changes one thing only, which is that there is work in the morning.
That is a smaller problem than it sounds, and the start time solves it rather than the date. Begin at five instead of seven, put the food out early, and you get a proper party that ends at a civilised hour rather than a slow one that ends at three.
What you gain is attention. On a Thursday nobody arrives having already sat through two other julefrokoster that week, nobody is watching the clock because of a second invitation, and the speeches land on a room that is listening. A Thursday is also, in practice, still free when the Fridays have gone. The rest of the company year sits on our corporate events page.
Saturday, and the case for the daytime
Saturday buys the longest evening of all and charges the most for it. It takes a whole weekend day from people who already had plans for it, so attendance among parents usually drops.
What it gives back is that nobody is measuring the night against tomorrow. That suits a workplace whose colleagues commute in from around Sjælland, because nobody has to leave early to catch a last connection, and it suits a company that wants partners invited rather than colleagues only. If your list is mostly people who live near each other and near the office, a Saturday is a lot of goodwill spent on an evening a Thursday would have covered. How to find us is on our Amager venue page.
Then there is the version the word itself describes. Frokost means lunch. A midday start on a Friday or a Saturday sends colleagues home in time for their own evening, suits anyone who would rather not drink much, and is the one shape of the party that parents rarely have to decline. It also gets daylight through the tall windows for the first half, which the December evening version never does.
Getting home is part of the day you choose
This is the piece most offices work out too late, and it depends on the weekday more than people expect.
The M2 metro runs 24 hours a day, and how often it runs depends on the night. In the small hours after a Friday or a Saturday a train comes along roughly every 8 minutes, and on the other nights of the week roughly every 20. So a Friday that drifts towards three in the morning is a short wait on the platform, while a Thursday that finishes at a sensible hour never leaves the ordinary evening service at all. Nobody is stranded on either day, and nobody has to organise a taxi rota.
For the colleagues who drive, parking here is free and on site, which in Copenhagen in December decides more arrivals than any other practical detail.
One thing is particular to this hall: the kitchen is inside the building. That is why a lunchtime julefrokost is exactly as easy to serve here as an evening one, and why the buffet is topped up hot across three hours rather than delivered once and left to cool.
Settling it in one meeting
- Name the colleagues you would most regret losing, then pick the day that keeps them.
- Ask whether the group drives or takes the metro, because that quietly sets your finish time.
- Decide evening or daytime before you decide a date. Everything else follows from it.
- Ring with two possible days rather than one, and a headcount range rather than a number.
We are one room for 30 to 120 guests on Højdevej 59 in Sundbyøster, so there is only one Thursday the 10th here and only one Friday the 11th. Ring us on +45 21 95 92 92, or send the two days you are weighing up to info@maiya.dk, and we will tell you which of them is still open. Or book a visit first, walk the room on a December afternoon, and settle the day once you have seen it.