When should you book the company Christmas lunch?

4 August 2026 · 5 min

It is August, and the two dates most Copenhagen offices will end up asking for are already on the calendar: Friday 4 December and Friday 11 December. Whoever was handed the julefrokost this year has been handed a calendar problem first and a menu problem second.

Here is the order to do it in, what each month of waiting quietly removes from your options, and what actually changes if you move the party to a Thursday or into January.

The two Fridays everyone asks for first

The Danish julefrokost season is short. It opens in the last week of November and closes once people start travelling for Christmas, which in 2026 means the party has to land on or before Friday 18 December. Inside that window Friday evening is the default, because nobody wants to give up a Saturday and nobody wants to be at a desk the next morning.

That leaves 4 and 11 December carrying most of the demand in the city. They are the dates we are asked about first, and the ones that stop being available first. The 18th looks open on paper, but it sits close enough to Christmas that a good part of any invitation list is already travelling or committed to family.

So the competition is really for two Friday evenings. If your company treats a Friday in early December as settled, you are not choosing between four weeks. You are choosing between two dates, and so is every other office in Copenhagen. What a December booking with us includes is set out on our Christmas party venue page.

What each month of waiting takes off the table

Ask in August or September and the conversation is about which date you want. Ask in October and it is about which of the remaining dates you can live with. Ask in November and it has stopped being a conversation about early December at all.

Nothing dramatic happens in between, which is exactly why this job drifts to the bottom of the list. There is no deadline until the morning there is no date.

There is a second reason to be early if your company is on the larger side. Our hall is one room for 30 to 120 guests, which covers a whole company or a single department, and there is only one of it. Two firms cannot both have the evening of 4 December, and a room booked for 60 is not available for the 45 who ask a fortnight later.

What a Thursday, or a January party, buys you

Moving the date is the easiest change available to you, and it is the one nobody proposes, because the julefrokost has always been on a Friday.

A Thursday in early December gives you the same week, the same season and the same colleagues, on a date that is still open when the Fridays have gone. It asks one thing of your guests, which is an early start the next morning. Most offices answer that by beginning at five instead of seven and finishing at a reasonable hour.

A January party gives you something better than availability, which is attention. Nobody arrives having already been to two other julefrokoster that week, the calendar is wide open, and Danish already has a word for a gathering held in the new year: a nytårskur.

What either choice really saves you is the ring-round. Instead of phoning six venues to find one free evening, you phone one and book it, and you spend the time you saved on the part your colleagues will remember. Other company events through the year sit on our corporate events page.

The five answers to collect before you ring anyone

You can settle a date in one phone call if you walk into it with these five things. Chase them from your colleagues now, in August, while nobody is busy.

• A guest number with a floor and a ceiling, not a single guess. Thirty firm and twenty maybe is a usable answer.
• Lunch or evening, and roughly what time it should end.
• Who signs it off, and how long that approval usually takes in your company.
• Dietary needs: how many vegetarians, and which allergies are serious.
• Drinks. The choice with us is between none at all, soft drinks, or your own bottles against a small corkage.

Our prices page shows how those pieces fit together, with a hall fee per person and the menus priced per person on top. The hall fee already covers decoration, sound system, projector, staff and cleaning, so the December party does not turn into a shopping list.

One thing worth knowing before you write the invitation. A julefrokost here does not have to be a sildebord. The kitchen is in the building and it is Maiya Nepali Kitchen, so a December menu can be built from momo dumplings and sekuwa, the charcoal grilled marinated meat of the eastern hills, rather than from herring. Any menu can be made fully vegetarian, which settles the awkward part of the list in one line.

Getting forty colleagues there and home again

We are on Højdevej 59 in Sundbyøster on Amager, and there is free parking on site, which is worth saying out loud in Copenhagen in December.

For everyone else, the bus stop at Sundby Kirkegård on Kastrupvej is about 181 m from our door and is served by line 8A. The M2 metro runs through the night, roughly every 8 minutes from 01:00 to 07:00 on a Friday, so a colleague who stays until the end is not stranded and nobody has to leave at eleven to catch anything.

Send us two dates and a rough headcount

That is genuinely all we need to tell you what is still free. Bring the range rather than the exact number, because the number will change twice before December anyway.

Ring +45 21 95 92 92 and we will check the date while you are still on the line. An email to info@maiya.dk works just as well. Best of all, book a visit and stand in the room before it goes into the invitation.