Your Christmas menu is done. Now put it everywhere.

Written for UK publicans. Last updated 8 September 2026.

You wrote it in August, argued about whether the sprouts stay, priced it and sent it to the printer. That was the hard part and it is finished. What is left is the same information typed into six different places, and most of it typed twice because something changes in November. Here is the order that wastes the least time.

Thirty seconds: the festive dates and menu entered once, and where they land. The long version is at the bottom of this page.

Start with the dates, not the menu

Customers ask whether you are open before they ask what you are serving. Every enquiry you take between now and Christmas comes back to seven answers:

Christmas Eve, and what time the kitchen stops
Christmas Day, whether you are open at all, and whether it is bookings only
Boxing Day
The dead week, 27 to 30 December
New Year's Eve, and whether it is ticketed
New Year's Day
The first normal day back

Write those seven answers down once, on paper or in a note on your phone, before you open a single website. Every job below is a copy of that list. If one of them changes in November, and one of them will, you will know exactly how many places have to change with it.

The six places a Christmas menu has to appear

Your own website. The menu as text on the page if you possibly can, not only a PDF. A PDF is hard for search engines to read properly and miserable to read on a phone, which is where nearly all of this gets read.
Your Facebook page. A post, pinned to the top, and the festive hours in the About section where people go looking when the post has scrolled away.
Your Google Business Profile. Special hours for each of those seven dates, and a post carrying the menu. This is the one that reaches people who will never visit your website.
Inside the pub. The A-board, the table talkers, the chalkboard and the bar. Your regulars are the easiest Christmas bookings you will get and they are standing in front of you.
Wherever you are already listed. Your finder page, the local what's-on, the parish magazine that still goes to four hundred doors.
Whoever answers the phone. Print the seven answers and put them by the till. A good share of Christmas enquiries still arrive that way, and one wrong answer from someone covering a shift costs you a table of eight.

What the person ringing you is actually checking

A Christmas booking is almost never one person. It is one person organising eight others, usually at half past nine at night, and they are working through a list in roughly this order: are you open on the day we want, can you seat eight, what time is the last sitting, how much is the deposit, can we see the menu, and is there something for the vegetarian and the one who cannot have gluten.

If any one of those is missing they move on to the next pub, because they have seven people waiting on an answer and no patience left. So put the deposit and the last sitting next to the menu, not in a separate post from three weeks ago. Most pubs lose Christmas bookings to a gap, not to a competitor.

Christmas on your Google listing, which is the fiddly bit

Google keeps holiday hours separately from your normal week, under Special hours in your Business Profile. Setting them is worth doing properly, because the listing is what shows up when somebody searches your pub by name or looks for a pub near them, and it is the version of your hours most people will see.

Two things worth knowing:

Google will ask you. From late November it prompts you to confirm your Christmas Day and Boxing Day hours. Answer it even if nothing is changing, because an unconfirmed holiday can show up to customers as a warning that your hours may not be right.
Other people can change your hours. Google takes suggested edits from the public and also infers hours from elsewhere on the web. Someone who turned up at four one quiet Tuesday and found the door shut can suggest that you close at four. Check the listing again in the week before Christmas, when it matters most and when it is most likely to have drifted.

Doing it once instead of six times

This is the part of the page that is about us, and it is the last part on purpose.

clockapub is one dashboard where a UK pub keeps its opening hours, kitchen times, events and offers, and sends them to its finder page, the screen in the pub, and Google and Facebook posts.

For Christmas that means you enter the seven dates once, as special dates, with the kitchen times against each one. Your finder page changes the moment you save it. The screen behind the bar changes with it. The Google post and the Facebook post are drafted for you out of the same change and go out when you tap send, never before and never without you seeing them.

The festive menu goes in the same way, once, and sits on your page until you take it down. When the chef decides in the third week of November that the beef is off, you change it in one place at four in the afternoon and everything we look after is right by five past.

It is free for every UK pub through 2026.

If you only do one thing this week

Write down the seven dates. Everything else on this page is a copy of that list, and the list is the thing that goes wrong.