The Real Reason Why We Love Christmas at the Pub

15 December 2025

Will Hawkes, Beer, Food & Travel Journalist

Let’s Set the Scene

Christmas is a time of tradition, in pubs as much as anywhere, but one ritual stands above all others. At this time of year, regulars playfully protest about those drinkers who only turn up in December – there, apparently, to make a scene and get in the way at the bar.

It doesn’t bother me. Quite the opposite: I love a packed Christmas pub. Getting together with friends in the pub at Christmas, especially those you’ve not seen for a while, is one of life’s genuine unalloyed pleasures.

This pleasure has marked every stage of my adult life. Christmas Eve in my Kentish local, catching up with friends back from university; The Independent newspaper’s sports desk lunch (taking in a fiercely contested quiz) in The Britannia off Kensington High Street; pre-match pints on Boxing Day; and one of my favourite current rituals, a Friday night out with a group of middle-aged pals in a particularly festive local pub.

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Christmas parties and dinners at Young's pubs

And while I’ve never been one of those who pops into the local when it opens for a few hours on Christmas Day – I’m too busy cooking – I certainly understand the impulse.

We all want to relax at Christmas, to feel like life’s stresses and strains have been suspended for a few happy hours. The pub is the only place for that; no need to book, no strict timetable, drink and eat what you like, when you like. In the end, the only fundamental is that sense of human connection.

That’s an experience open to those of us who are regular pubgoers and those who aren’t – as long, of course, as they don’t block the bar.

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