How To Prepare Your Home For Santa’s Visit

Prepping for Mr Claus and his eight tiny reindeer

Santa and his eight tiny reindeer will be on their way to your house soon, so it is imperative you take a few necessary precautions to protect your home and furniture. But even more importantly, ensure Santa, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen have an enjoyable and safe visit.

In this post, we will cover off on preparing both the outside and inside of your home. But we will include a few post-visit tips as well. Last year, we had many people contact us post-Christmas to find out how to clean up soot!

Outside preparation

• Make sure your roof is reindeer and sled ready, because the sled is heavy and all of those hooves need to have a safe place to land and stand!
  • Check your shingles and ensure all tiles are safe and secure, so those hooves don’t slip or trip when prancing around.
  • Make sure you repair any cracks or roof damages to ensure a smooth sleigh take-off and landing.
• Trim overhanging branches and remove any big ones that have fallen on your roof. The reindeer have a big job ahead of them (Australia is one of the first countries they visit), so tripping over or hitting a branch this early in their journey could have a dire outcome for the rest of the world.
• Check the bricks surrounding the opening of your chimney to see if any are loose. You wouldn’t want one of those bricks following Santa down and knocking him on the head!
• Make sure any Christmas decorations, such as lights or inflatable Santa’s are not blocking your roof runway.

Inside preparation

• Chimney Care
  • Clean your chimney. Not only does Santa not appreciate being covered in ash and soot, but your house won’t either. There is nothing worse than waking up on Christmas morning to a cleaning frenzy.
  • Leave the chimney damper open. We don’t even want to think about what would happen if this remains closed on Christmas (Think “Headline News: Santa Gets Stuck on Christmas”).
• Protect your furniture from ashes and soot by either moving it away from your fireplace or covering it with some tarpaulin or old blankets & towels.
• Make sure there are no tripping hazards on or around the floor.
  • Pick up toys, shoes, and other small items off the floor.
  • Tape down any Christmas light cords that are loose on the ground.
• Hang your stockings with glee, but ensure they are secure.
  • ​Use command hooks or strings such as twine, thread, ribbon or clear fishing line to hang your stockings. Think twice about using nails as this will leave holes.
  • Stockings also do not need to be hung from fireplaces. They can be hung anyplace sturdy enough to hold a couple of kilos: deck railings, bed posts, the back of kitchen chairs, etc.

• Advice on leaving out treats for Santa and the reindeer:
  • ​Make sure the food you leave for Santa and the reindeer is out of reach from possums and mice. They seem to know when Christmas arrives and are on high alert!
  • Leave some carrots or apples for the reindeer. They work pretty hard to get that sleigh around the world.
  • Don’t forget a glass of milk (or milk alternative) and some water for the reindeer. Surprisingly, many people forget that the reindeer get very very thirsty too!

• Most importantly: If you have a working fireplace, make sure it is out by the time you go to bed, although this is not too much of a risk in most of Australia!

Post-visit tips

Below are a few tips on cleaning up your house after Santa’s visit.

• Indoors:
  • ​If your chimney clean didn’t prevent all of the soot from getting inside when Santa came bounding down, then you can clean carpet and upholstery easily with some baking soda/cornstarch. Follow these easy instructions.
  • Santa and the reindeer have to eat really quickly (they have a lot of territories to cover), so there are usually crumbs leftover. Make sure you show the kids before you vacuum these up though! If you don’t have a chimney, it will be the only evidence that Santa has actually been in the house.

• Outdoors:
  • ​Give your roof a quick look over to making sure there isn’t too much reindeer poop that will fall into your gutters and clog them. If there is (carefully) sweep the pellets off the roof and onto your garden where it will make brilliant fertiliser.

Follow these simple tips, and you are guaranteed to have a Jolly Old Elf whose “belly will shake when he laughs, like a bowl full of jelly” this Christmas after he has a super-smooth visit to your house. And you may even hear him exclaim ere he drives out of sight: “Happy Christmas to all and a good night!”

Note: References for this blog post were taken from “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, more commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, poem by Clement Clarke Moore. Highly recomended Christmas Eve book to read to kids before tucking them in before bed before Santa’s arrival.