Unique Christmas party ideas for your team
The end of the year is the perfect time to celebrate your team, reflect on the wins, and enjoy a well-earned break together. But if the idea of another luke-warm roast dinner and secret Santa doesn’t fill you with joy, it might be time to rethink your office Christmas party.
From foodie challenges to creative workshops and wellbeing escapes, Yuup’s experiences make it easy to find something your whole team will actually love. Here’s our guide to the best Christmas party ideas for every type of team.
The foodie team
Learn how to ferment sauerkraut or hot sauce: Old Market, Bristol
Take your team on a truly hands-on culinary adventure with this sauerkraut-making class in East Bristol. Guided by an expert host, you’ll learn the science (and art) behind fermentation – from prepping fresh, local ingredients to flavouring and packing your jars to take home.
Why it works: This workshop is perfect for teams who love trying something new and learning a skill with a tasty payoff. It’s interactive, healthy, and surprisingly social – a great icebreaker for foodie-minded teams.
Festive twist: Add a seasonal element by using festive flavours like red cabbage, apple, or spiced juniper. It’s the perfect complement to Christmas leftovers or as a handmade gift for colleagues or family members.
Book a fermentation masterclass in Bristol
Wapping Wharf food tour: Harbourside, Bristol
Explore Bristol’s foodie-hub at Wapping Wharf with your colleagues on a guided tasting journey. You’ll visit six independent eateries and street-food vendors, discover the stories behind local businesses, and enjoy a progressive meal over 90–120 minutes.
Why it works: Shared tastings, local culture and a great conversation starter.
Christmas twist: Your host will be working with all their favourite eateries to choose seasonal specials for this tour.
Book a food tour in Bristol
The team that gets crafty
Christmas wreath making: multiple locations in Bristol & Bath
A festive session where your team crafts handmade wreaths from fresh foliage and natural decorations.
Why it works: Relaxed and social, this activity lets everyone get creative without pressure. Plus, everyone leaves with a beautiful handmade wreath to hang at home.
Festive twist: Lots of our hosts have added mince pies or mulled wine to make it a full-on Christmas celebration, or invite you to BYOB to enjoy while you craft.
Book a wreath workshop in Bath or Bristol
Christmas decoration making: multiples venues in Bristol
Group graffiti workshop: Bristol, City Centre
Step outside the usual craft box with a graffiti workshop hosted at a vibrant creative venue in Bristol. Your team will explore street-art techniques, design a tag or name board, and spray-paint a canvas to take home.
Why it works: Bold, energetic and so very ‘Bristol’ – great for sparking creative thinking, team confidence and collaboration.
Idea: Why not design a collaborative piece that becomes a team keepsake for the office.
Book a graffiti workshop with Graft
The nature-loving team
Foraging walk for edible plants & herbs: Conham River, Bristol
Take your team on a guided foraging walk through riverside woodlands near Bristol, discovering wild edible plants and herbs together.
Why it works: It’s immersive, breaks the usual meeting mould and offers shared discovery and fresh perspective.
Why you’ll love it: Finish with wild-herb tea or a hot-chocolate stop amid the woods for a wintry team treat.
Book a foraging walk in Bristol
Team-Building wildlife safari: Forest of Dean
Head to the forest for a team adventure amid ancient trees, wildlife spotting and woodland challenges.
Why it works: Outdoor, active and different – it builds camaraderie, encourages movement and gives everyone a chance to reset.
Top tip: Choose a late-autumn slot in November or December and wrap it up with a mulled cider by the fire.
Book a team wildlife safari
Teams that love a tipple
Cocktail making or tasting workshop: Clifton, Bristol
Team sip & paint session: multiple venues in Bristol
Join a guided social painting event with the PopUp Painting team, where your group will follow step-by-step instructions to paint a vibrant artwork while enjoying a relaxed setting.
Why it works: Combines creativity and casual socialising – let’s be honest, it’s mostly about the cocktails!
Festive twist: Most of the sessions in the run up to Christmas have themds (e.g. “snowy landscapes”, or “festive lights”), and can be paired with seasonal drinks or snacks for an extra touch of celebration.
Book a paint and sip workshop in Bristol
Make this years Christmas party one you’ll actually remember.
It’s no secret that creatives thrive on collaboration, culture, and team spirit. But when it comes to socials, too many of us fall back on the same old routine – a quick drink at the pub. Fun, sure. But does it really reflect the creativity and originality our teams live and breathe every day?
That’s where Yuup comes in. As a Bristol-based marketplace for local experiences, Yuup connects teams with independent hosts offering unique activities right here in our city. From hands-on workshops to unforgettable evenings out, Yuup makes it easy to plan socials that are as inspiring as the work your agency creates.
Here are 10 fresh ideas to inspire your next agency get-together:
- Create Together in a Pottery Workshop
Working with clay is hands-on, playful, and grounding – the opposite of digital screen time. For creatives, it taps into the joy of making, sparks conversation, and encourages collaboration in a calm, open setting.
- Compete in a Mexican Cook-Off
Cooking together builds collaboration under pressure while leaving room for fun and improvisation. For agency teams, it mirrors the creative process: ideas, execution, and presentation – with the added reward of sharing a meal together.
- Explore the Outdoors on a Forest Safari
Escaping the city resets creative energy and helps teams see each other outside of daily routines. Fresh air and shared discovery are powerful for agency teams who thrive on new perspectives and storytelling.
- Experiment with flavours on a Team Fermentation Workshop
This hands-on workshop encourages teamwork through creativity, patience, and shared discovery. From kombucha to kimchi, teams will learn ancient techniques with a modern twist, sparking conversations about flavour, culture, and process. Just like agency work, it’s about experimenting, refining, and enjoying the results together.
- Test Your Senses with Cocktails in the Dark
Removing sight forces teams to rely on other senses – and each other. It’s an exercise in trust, problem-solving, and adaptability, making it a uniquely bonding experience for teams used to thinking outside the box.
- Reconnect with Nature on a Group Foraging Walk
Guided by an expert, teams explore local landscapes while learning to identify edible plants and herbs. It’s mindful, surprising, and deeply grounding – a perfect antidote to screen time. For creative teams, it offers fresh perspectives and inspiration drawn directly from nature.
- Draw and Connect at Drink & Draw
A relaxed, low-pressure space to sketch, laugh, and share ideas. For creative teams, it encourages vulnerability (nobody expects perfection), which builds trust and sparks new conversations beyond project briefs.
- Print Your Ideas in a Workshop
Printmaking celebrates experimentation and bold expression – perfect for teams who work with design and ideas daily. It encourages individuals to create side by side, with instant visual results that celebrate group creativity.
- Unwind with Dog Life Drawing
It’s playful, surprising, and guaranteed to make people smile. For creatives, this light-hearted experience breaks down barriers, reduces stress, and encourages teams to see the world (and each other) differently.
- Discover Bristol’s Best on a Wapping Wharf Food Tour
Exploring the city’s independent food scene gives teams the chance to connect socially while discovering new stories and flavours. It’s an experience rooted in place and culture – something every creative agency can appreciate.
The right social can do more than fill a calendar slot. It can spark ideas, strengthen culture, and remind your team why they love working together. Whether it’s creating, cooking, exploring, or simply laughing side by side, these experiences go far beyond a night at the pub.
Explore Yuup’s Made for Teams and plan a social your agency will talk about long after the night is over.
Yuup is looking for community heroes and local champions to take on a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Know someone that is a local champion? An unsung hero that gives their spare time to supporting their community and making Bristol a better place for everyone to live?
Yuup is on the hunt for local Bristol community heroes and you can nominate them to win the experience of a lifetime in the Yuup hot air balloon ride giveaway.
Community is at the heart of Yuup and the company is known for enabling positive social impact. Every day the business works closely with people, charities and small businesses that pour their hearts into making a positive local impact. It’s clear that there are a number of unsung heroes that Bristol wouldn’t be the same without.
The Bristol-born local marketplace is giving away a hot air balloon flight over Bristol to one lucky person that deserves some recognition for their hard work and dedication to bringing positive social impact to their local area.
How to enter
In appreciation of people making a difference in their community, Yuup is inviting you to nominate someone via the Yuup Instagram page @say.yuup.
Head to the balloon flight giveaway post pinned to the top of the page and follow the instructions to nominate your special person.
They might be a whizz at volunteering or brilliant at fundraising, they could spend their weekends clearing rubbish or caring for animals, they might have started a community group, club, or night out that helps people connect.
The winner will be picked at random from entries with the most inspiring individuals.
Nominations are open until 6pm on 25th August. Full T&Cs can be found on the Instagram post.
Employee engagement is an efficient business strategy. Happy, engaged, and resilient staff is the ultimate goal, but it’s easier said than done.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to employee engagement. It’s a mix of rewards, recognition, wellbeing, and community-building. Yuup provides a bespoke solution to each of these concerns surrounding employee engagement:
- Team-building and experience days/nights
- Personal rewards for big wins and target achievement: experience vouchers or specially-selected experiences
- Wellbeing support: confidence-building masterclasses, sound baths, reiki, yoga, fitness and nutrition classes, art therapy, meditation classes, crafting experiences
- Birthday, anniversary, leaving, and Christmas gifts
- Pottery and pints at the pub
- Rum-tasting masterclass in Stokes Croft
- Creative journaling for mental health workshop
- Bounce, beer and pizza at an indoor trampoline park
- Fresh water wild swimming
- Cider tour around the harbourside
- Clay pigeon shooting
- Crafting with afternoon tea in Bedminster
- Introduction to wine tasting
- Dinner in the dark experience
How can Yuup help businesses?
Employees are the heart of your business and the reason you exist. They’re also a significant investment, so it makes sense to invest in them as well.
Yuup offers a solution for employee engagement that goes beyond traditional perks such as free lunches or flexible working hours.
Based on research into what employees want from their employers, Yuup provides businesses with an innovative way to engage their teams by giving them recognition and rewarding them with things to do that are enriching and personal whilst stimulating the local economy and supporting small businesses.
What is Yuup?
Yuup is an online marketplace that offers a range of experiences that are perfect for businesses both big and small.
From team-building days to performance rewards and from staff wellbeing experiences to ways to celebrate big wins. It’s a way for businesses to engage their staff in ways they may not have been able to before.
Yuup offers a new and innovative way to engage employees. With Yuup, you can:
- Offer employees recognition in a personal way- Have they gone above and beyond? Choose a reward or gift for an employee that is completely personal to them. Are they a foodie? Treat them to a food and drink experience! Are they into crafts? You’ll find over 100+ crafting workshops that they can get stuck into.
- Provide incentives- Employees will know that their hard work will be rewarded by something that is unique and supports local or is exclusive to them.
- Boost morale- Make your team feel valued with team-building activity days, work drinks with a twist, and wellbeing experiences that support their mental health and help them de-stress
Please note: Since publication this crowdfund has closed. £988,776 was raised in 28 days with Yuup reaching 131% of its desired fundraising target.
Yuup, the Bristol-based online local experiences marketplace, has been offering the city’s creative community a platform to generate income through hosting experiences since it was founded in September 2020.
In just a year company has grown from supporting just under 40 experience hosts to now being a community with over 270 people and small businesses and 500+ experiences to enjoy throughout Bristol city.
On Yuup’s platform you will find anything from unicycle lessons to rum tasting, wild winter swimming to hot air balloon rides, and pottery making to fresh pasta making masterclasses. Each one of these unique experiences is hosted by a local person that can’t wait to share their skills and passion with new people.
The platform has seen side-hustlers and hobbyists turn their favourite thing to do into a business and their main source of income. In the past year, Yuup has generated over £450k of income for local people and small independent creative businesses in the Bristol and Bath region.
Maria Fernandez, from Healing Weeds, hosts foraging workshops in Bristol. Her experiences teach guests how to identify seasonal wild produce and how to make balms, medicines, cordials, and elixirs from the foraged harvest. Using Yuup, Maria was able to change her career in order to properly pursue the thing she loves. She said:
“Yuup helped me turn my hobby into a business and Healing Weeds is now my main source of income.”
A positive impact for creative sectors and small independent businesses
Since launching in the middle of a pandemic, Yuup has been used by Bristol creatives to help their income streams and businesses bounce back from lockdown and the effects of the pandemic.
The drop in economic activity within the UK in response to the pandemic impacted SMEs and the self-employed significantly in comparison to their larger business counterparts.
Local businesses were forced to adapt in order to survive. For indie businesses that could facilitate experiences, Yuup provided a platform that allowed alternative revenue streams to the local businesses that were struggling to achieve their pre-pandemic footfall.
Alice from Trylla shop on North Street joined Yuup early on in order to use the platform as a kickstart to her business’ post-pandemic recovery. Her pottery making experiences have been so popular that Alice has since hired new staff to help support the demand for her pottery classes on Yuup.
Yuup’s positive social impact extends to platform support, marketing, and a ticketing system for charity events and fundraisers. Yuup’s recent collaboration with Belly Laughs comedy festival 2022 raised over 22k for charity and generated over 10k of revenue for local restaurants and bars. The company have also recently supported grassroots charities such as MAZI Project and KASK’s Ukraine Fundraiser.
Four ways to join Yuup’s growing community
At the start of February 2022, Yuup announced that the business will be opening up investment to the public to allow for the company’s scaling up operations this year. There are a number of ways that you can join the Yuup community. As an investor, as a Yuup host, by introducing a Yuup host, or as a customer.
How to join the Yuup community as an investor: Yuup’s crowdfund is open until March 31st, and the funds raised will go towards reaching hundreds more potential experience hosts in Bristol and Bath, generating income and jobs for locals and the communities that need it most.
Yuup will also be launching in its second city this summer, connecting creatives, makers and dreamers from another UK city to the Yuup community.
You can join the crowdfund from as little as £20. You will own a part of Yuup and participate in the financial rewards of share ownership. Your investment will support local independent businesses whilst helping even more people to discover incredible things to do in their local area. Visit the Yuup crowdfund webpage to watch the investment film and find out more here: https://invest.yuup.co/
How to join Yuup as an experience host: If you are a creative or passionate local person, you could turn that love of something into an experience for others to enjoy. Yuup helps people create, promote, and host experiences.
It’s free to join the platform, and you get simple tools, a host portal, and marketing support and investment. A small commission is taken from each sold experience, so Yuup only makes money when you make money.
The scope for experiences is almost boundless. From food and drink tours to cooking classes, craft workshops to cinema nights, outdoor adventures to indoor wellbeing sessions. If you love it, why not share the experience? Get in touch with the Yuup team about your future experience here: https://www.yuup.co/pages/join
How to introduce an experience host: Do you know a wicked weaver? A crowd-pleasing cook? A passionate painter? A cool climber? Refer your friend to the Yuup team and help them turn their passion into a business. Refer an experience host here: https://www.yuup.co/host_referrals/new
How to join the Yuup community as a customer: Just browse yuup.co and pick something that you would love to do! Alternatively, you can also buy experiences as gifts, purchase gift cards, or use Yuup’s experiences in your employee rewards scheme.
Prolonged work stress and burnout are on the rise in employees according to a study conducted last year by Indeed. The findings showed that over half of those that took the study (52%) had experienced burnout in 2021 and that burnout is affecting employees of all ages and types of workers in 2022.
Encouraging and supporting employee wellbeing is becoming more of a concern for management and those in positions of leadership. Having happy and healthy employees is good for productivity, talent retention, and for the long term success of a business- but it’s also a concern on a very human level. For those managing and caring for a team of people, it’s hard to watch anyone struggle.
But how do you ensure that you are making the right steps for employee wellbeing? There are many solutions, but it all depends on the nature of your organisation and the people working within it. Companies such as Bumble and Nike have made headlines by giving their staff a week off to re-energise and others such as Google have wellness programmes that allow staff to spend more time with their families, choose how they best recharge, and allow them to pursue fulfilment outside of the office.
You don’t have to be a massive, global company to implement staff wellness practices. In fact, many small businesses and start-ups that rely on the efforts of a small, dedicated team have found the benefits of having a rewards package that looks after employee mental health.
At Yuup, we offer businesses the opportunity to purchase experience vouchers as rewards for their employees or to book group wellness sessions to refresh and rejuvenate their team. With a diverse range of lifestyle and wellness hosts and experiences on Yuup, we have something to suit and support any team.
Discover positive sleep with The Sleep Guru
One of the biggest issues plaguing the office is the lack of a decent night’s sleep. Irregular sleeping patterns, bad sleep habits, and disrupted sleep can cause fatigue, burnout, stress, and illness.
Working together with our host Giles, you’ll embark on a journey to demystify sleep and discover solutions to this nightly battle. As a coach, mentor, and author of ‘Positive Sleep – A Holistic Approach to Resolve Sleep Issues and Transform Your Life’, Giles has overcome his own obstacles with sleep and insomnia and is prepared to guide you through your own recovery.
After the session you will receive a copy of his book to take home and continue your journey.
Mindfulness group meditation with lunch with Breathe Meditation
We have a number of experiences to enjoy with Breathe Meditation, both for individuals and groups. This experience, in particular, is an excellent idea for team-building with a difference. Instead of after-work drinks or a challenge to get the cogs going, it might make a refreshing change to go for something that boosts everyone’s mood and gives you all time to connect on a deeper level.
Encourage harmony and peace among coworkers with a work lunch like no other.
Nature inspired art at Bridge Farm with Clare Lowe Creative Workshops
Clare is an artist currently studying to become an art therapist. With a wealth of knowledge in emotional healing and de-stressing, Clare will guide you and your team through unwinding through both creativity and nature.
Set against the peaceful backdrop of Bridge Farm, their workshops centre around wellbeing and communication and their experience is a great way of creating a safe and open space for colleagues to open up about any internal difficulties they might be experiencing.
Private confidence building masterclass by Confidence & Co
We’ve all lost our confidence at one time or another. Self-doubt, low-self esteem, and impostor syndrome can all creep in- especially if we aren’t feeling our best shiny selves. It’s hard to admit if you are lacking or have lost confidence in yourself, and it can seriously affect your performance at work.
Confidence is not all about being good at public speaking or being the loudest voice in the room, it’s about trusting in yourself and your abilities. If you have noticed an employee or colleague that seems to be wavering in their self-belief, offering support in this area could completely change their life and stop them from heading towards burnout or mental distress. Similarly, you might feel that you need to develop your inner cheerleader and would benefit from this one-on-one masterclass in confidence.
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