By about four on Christmas Day there’s usually a dog wedged behind an armchair with his ears flat, watching eleven people he half-recognises eat things he isn’t allowed.
Nobody’s been unkind to him. It’s just that the house has become an entirely different place over the course of a fortnight, and no one thought to mention it to him.
For a confident dog, Christmas is a fortnight of interesting smells and dropped potatoes. For an anxious one it can be the hardest stretch of the year, and it’s worth a bit of planning in the same way that fireworks are.
Why it’s harder than it looks
It isn’t the noise, particularly, or not only that. It’s that every single thing a dog uses to feel secure gets dismantled at once.
The routine goes first. Meals drift, walks happen at odd times or get skipped, people are home who are normally out, and the reliable shape of the day disappears for two weeks.
Then the house physically changes. Furniture is moved to make room. There’s a tree in the corner where there wasn’t one. Boxes appear, then piles of paper, then a table extension nobody has seen since last year.
Then the people. A stream of relatives, some of whom the dog met once, some of whom he’s never met, arriving in bursts and staying for hours. Children who move unpredictably and are at exactly face height. Doors going constantly.
And crucially, no downtime. A dog who normally gets eight or nine hours of undisturbed sleep during the day is getting none, for days on end, in a house he can’t get away from.
That’s the bit to fix. Not the noise, not the visitors, but the absence of anywhere to switch off – and the way it accumulates over a week rather than being one difficult evening. A quiet room he can actually use, a routine that survives the chaos in some recognisable form, and daily Calming Treats for Dogs started a couple of weeks before the first guest arrives, will do more than anything you attempt on the day itself.
Set the room up in November
Pick the quietest room in the house, as far from the front door as you can manage. Spare bedroom, study, utility, wherever nobody will be putting coats.
Put his bed in there, a bowl of water, a blanket that smells of him, and something to chew. A radio on low is useful for masking the noise from the rest of the house. If he’s crate-trained, put the crate in there with the door open.
Then use it, well before Christmas. Feed him in there. Give him his chew in there each afternoon. Let it become an ordinary part of the house rather than somewhere he gets shut when things get difficult, because a dog who first sees that room on Christmas Eve will read it as banishment.
Put a sign on the door. It sounds excessive; it’s the only thing that reliably stops a well-meaning cousin from opening it to say hello.
The tree and the rest of it
Put the decorations up over a few days instead of in one afternoon. The dog gets to investigate each new thing in his own time rather than coming downstairs to a transformed room.
Practical bits: secure the tree properly, because a dog with a wagging tail and a tree on a plastic stand is a well-documented combination. Keep chocolate decorations off the lower branches. Tuck light cables away from anything that chews. Skip the tinsel entirely if you’ve got a dog who eats things, because it’s a nasty surgical problem when it goes wrong.
Lilies and poinsettias are worth checking on if you’re given them. Lilies are far more dangerous to cats than dogs, but neither is a plant you want a puppy chewing.
The front door
Arrivals are the worst moment of the day, every time. Everyone talking at once, coats, bags, hugs, the door open and shut half a dozen times.
Put him in his room five minutes before people are due, not as they’re pulling up. Let everyone get in, get their coats off, sit down and stop being a crowd. Then, if he wants to come out, let him come out – on his own terms, without anyone approaching him.
If he’d rather stay put, leave him. A dog who spends Christmas Day asleep in the spare room has had a good Christmas Day.
Children
This is where the actual risk sits, and it’s worth being blunt about.
Most bites to children happen at home, from a familiar dog, in exactly this kind of situation: a tired, overstimulated dog with nowhere to go, and a child who hugs him or climbs on him or wakes him up.
Two rules make almost all of it go away. Nobody touches the dog when he’s in his bed or in his room – not to stroke him, not to say goodnight, not for a photograph. And no unsupervised contact between visiting children and the dog at all, which means an adult in the room and actually watching rather than in the room and on their phone.
If the children are very young or there are a lot of them, baby gates are worth more than any amount of instruction.
The guest who loves dogs
Harder to manage than the one who doesn’t, because they mean so well.
They’ll go straight over. They’ll lean down, put their face near his, take his head in both hands, talk to him in a high voice, and tell you not to worry because dogs love them.
Get in first: “he’s a bit nervous, so we’re just leaving him to come to you.” Say it as they’re taking their coat off, before it becomes a correction. Give them something to do – a couple of treats to drop on the floor without looking at him – because people who’ve been given a job are much easier to manage than people who’ve been given a rule.
Bangs and crackers
Crackers, party poppers and champagne corks are all sudden, sharp and unexpected, and for a noise-sensitive dog they’re small fireworks going off at the table.
Put him in his room before the crackers. Same for any party poppers the children have got hold of. It costs nothing and it saves you a dog who’s decided the dining room is dangerous.
Keep the boring bits
Whatever else collapses, hold on to two things: feeding times and a walk.
The walk matters more than usual, partly for the dog and partly because it gets you out of the house too. Go somewhere quiet and let him sniff. Early morning on Christmas Day is one of the best walks of the year – everywhere is empty.
And build in the downtime deliberately. A couple of hours in his room after lunch, with a stuffed Kong, whether or not he seems to need it. Dogs are poor judges of when they’ve had enough, in the same way small children are, and by the time it’s obvious you’ve usually left it too late.
What he mustn’t eat
Worth a quick list, because this is the season for it and the out-of-hours fees are eye-watering.
Chocolate. Raisins, sultanas and currants, which means mince pies, Christmas pudding, stollen and most of the cake – and these are genuinely dangerous in small amounts. Onions, garlic and leeks, including in stuffing and gravy. Cooked bones, which splinter. Macadamia nuts. Blue cheese. Alcohol, including the bowl of trifle. And anything sugar-free that might contain xylitol.
Rich, fatty leftovers are the other one. A dog who’s had a plate of goose skin and stuffing is a decent candidate for pancreatitis, and that’s a serious illness rather than an upset stomach.
Tell the visitors, out loud, that nobody feeds the dog anything. Half the trouble comes from an uncle who thought a bit of turkey wouldn’t hurt.
If you’re the one travelling
Taking a nervous dog to somebody else’s Christmas is harder again, because you lose the one advantage you had at home: he knew the building.
Take his own bed, his own bowls, his own food, and the blanket off his usual spot. Familiar smells do a lot of work in an unfamiliar house.
Ask in advance which room he can have, and set it up the moment you arrive rather than at the point where he’s already struggling. If your host can’t offer you a room with a door, that’s worth knowing before you commit to three nights.
Walk him around the outside of the house and garden on a lead when you get there, before anyone greets him. Ten minutes of sniffing the perimeter tells him more about where he is than an hour of being fussed in the kitchen.
And check the garden gate yourself. A dog in a strange house with a full front door and a gate that doesn’t latch properly is how people spend Boxing Day driving round an unfamiliar village calling a dog’s name.
New Year, and afterwards
Don’t relax at Boxing Day. New Year’s Eve is a firework night, and it catches people out because they’ve spent all their preparation on Christmas.
Then, once it’s all over, expect a few flat days. A dog who’s been coping with a full house for a week will need a quiet stretch afterwards – short familiar walks, plenty of sleep, nothing new. Keep any calming supplement going through to the middle of January rather than stopping the moment the tree comes down.
When he’s better off elsewhere
Worth saying plainly: if your dog finds all of this genuinely awful, and you’re hosting fourteen people, the kindest option might be for him not to be there.
A weekend with a quiet relative, a trusted sitter, or a small home boarder who takes one dog at a time is not a failure of love. For some dogs it’s a far better Christmas than the one on offer at home, and it’s worth arranging in October rather than the week before, because the good ones book up early.
