Plan a holiday dinner: portions, timings and who brings what

A pound and a quarter of whole bird per adult. Fourteen adults is about seventeen and a half pounds; if four of your fourteen are children, it is closer to fifteen.

That is the whole calculation, and the reason to have a page do it is not the arithmetic. It is that a holiday table is not fourteen identical appetites. Four children eat about half what an adult eats, two teenagers eat about a quarter more, and a headcount that treats all twenty the same is either twenty pounds of bird or a quiet panic at half past four. So this page asks for three numbers instead of one and works in adult portions: a child counts as a half, a big eater as one and a quarter.

The per-person amounts are the conventional guidance rather than anything measured — a pound and a quarter of bird, half a pound of potatoes, a quarter pound of each side, half a bottle of wine per adult. They lean generous on purpose: running out is the failure people actually mind, and leftovers are half the point of the meal. Every one of them is editable once the dish is on your list, because you know whether your family eats sprouts and this page does not.

One thing it deliberately does not do is round up to what a shop sells. A seventeen-and-a-half-pound target becomes an eighteen-pound bird because that is what was in the case, and a page that quietly rounded every dish up to the next convenient size would add a quarter to the shopping across eighteen of them.

Every dish on the table has a cook time, and every one of them is easy. What is hard is that there is one oven.

This is the failure that actually happens on the day: the plan is fine dish by dish, the bird is out and resting, and at twenty past three the potatoes, the sprouts, the stuffing and the rolls all want forty minutes in a space that fits two. Somebody's dish comes out half done, or dinner is at six.

So the page counts backwards from the time you said you were eating, works out when each dish starts, and then tells you when the most things want the oven at once — which dishes, and between which two times. It does not try to solve it, because real ovens hold two or three things when the temperatures agree and this page does not know your temperatures. The useful thing is knowing that half past three is the crunch, while there is still time to move something to the stovetop, bake it early and reheat, or let the bird rest twenty minutes longer.

Resting comes off the end rather than the start, which is worth knowing because getting it backwards is a common way to be an hour out. A bird that rests half an hour comes *out* of the oven half an hour before the meal — it does not go in half an hour later.

Most dishes take what they take: rolls are twelve minutes whether you are feeding six or sixteen. The bird is not, and it is the one that decides the shape of the day.

Whole turkey is roughly fifteen minutes a pound plus half an hour, so a twelve-pound bird is about three and a half hours and an eighteen-pound bird is nearly five. That is an hour and a half of difference, all of it in the morning, and a planner with one fixed turkey time is wrong for nearly everybody. So a dish here can carry extra minutes per unit of its finished size, and the timings recompute when the headcount changes.

It is still an estimate, and the last word belongs to a thermometer in the thigh rather than to any page. What the arithmetic is for is knowing whether the oven needs to be on at nine or at noon.

Add the people bringing something and assign each dish. The sheet then says what each person is bringing, who has nothing yet, and which dishes nobody has claimed.

Two small things make this more useful than a list in a group chat. A dish with nobody against it stays on the plan and stays visible as unclaimed, rather than being quietly dropped — an unassigned dish is a real state, and it is the state every dish starts in. And somebody who leaves the list takes their assignments with them: the dishes they were bringing go back to unclaimed rather than staying filed against a name that is no longer coming.

For planning, one plan is completely fine, and it is why this page is a free tool rather than a signup form. One person is hosting. They know who is coming, they know what the oven can take, and the plan is a thing they send out, not a thing they negotiate.

What it cannot do is let the guests claim their own dish. You send the link, and everybody can read every figure on it — but if they reply "I'll do the pie" and send it back, you now have two plans and the newer one wins by accident. One person keeps it, everybody else reads it.

That is fine for a dinner and it stops being fine for anything bigger or longer. Twenty-odd people claiming nights of meals for a family after a new baby or a funeral is a different job entirely: nobody can be the bottleneck, the list has to be right the moment two people claim the same night, and the person organising it should not be relaying twenty replies by hand. That needs one shared list that everybody writes into, and it is what the Meal Train app does — one link, and the neighbours, the church and the coworkers claim their own night without an account between them.

• Meal Train
• Family Meals
• Event RSVPs

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. This page stays free either way.

• A realistic weekly family planning routine that takes 20 minutes
• How to share the mental load at home, not just the chores
• Split shared expenses and see who pays who
• Make a printable chore chart for your family