Enjoy your Christmas holiday with these apps and websites

The holiday season is often associated with festive get-togethers, popping champagne corks, and plenty of gastronomic delights. But the days leading up to the joyous clinking of glasses can be full of stress.

This stress often comes from trying to cram five hours worth of tasks into a hurried lunch break, or stress from elbowing your way through crowds of irritable shoppers while tapping out a merry Christmas email on your phone.

We're here to help! Here are some useful, and mostly free, apps and websites to help you organize your Christmas so you can get into the spirit of the holiday season.

Planning your Christmas: Personal to-do apps

No matter how good your memory or how structured your day, the hectic pace of the holiday season can turn even the most well-organized person into a pile of ineffective mush. This is where a to-do app can help.

The good news is that, if you use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace apps, you already have a simple and straightforward task management tool at your fingertips.

Google Tasks (browser, Android, iOS) is a no-frills personal to-do list that can be accessed across your various Workspace apps, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Drive. It includes all the basic features you'd find in other task management tools: multiple task creation points, task details, subtasks, due dates, recurring events, and notifications. Your tasks sync seamlessly with Google Calendar and you can quickly turn any Gmail message into a task list item.

Google Tasks is a very simple to-do list manager that seamlessly integrates with Gmail, Calendar, and other Workspace apps.

Microsoft To Do (browser, Android, iOS) is slightly more robust than Google Tasks and can be accessed from within many apps in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Based on the now-defunct Wunderlist (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015), To Do has the same basic functions as Google Task but also includes more advanced features, such as list sharing and file attachments.

One of its more unique features is the “My Day” page, which lets you select tasks across multiple lists and display them on a single page so that you can plan your day accordingly. To Do will even make suggestions as to which tasks you should include on your My Day page.

Microsoft To Do is integrated across different Microsoft 365 applications and contains all the basic task management features you need to organize your Christmas.

Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do should be more than enough to plan and organize your Christmas activities. But if you want to look completely outside of the Google or Microsoft ecosystems, Any.do and Todoist are great personal tasks management alternatives. They both have free versions, but some features are only available in their paid plans.

(FYI: If you're interested in a more in-depth look at to-do apps, keep your eyes on this blog because we're planning a full-length article in the near future that will cover them in much greater detail.)

Spread some Christmas joy: Shopping and gifting apps

When it comes to gifting options, global reach, and speed of service, there are few online shops that can beat Amazon (browser, Android, iOS). Their well-organized “Holiday Gift Guide” lets you browse by giftee type, interests, and price range. And you can organize what you'd like to buy for yourself and others by creating categorized and shareable wish lists.

Amazon lets you gift just about anything to anyone around the world.

Christmas Gift List (Android) by engApps—not to be confused with many other apps with identical or similar names—is a useful and simple Christmas-specific app. It lets you create dedicated gift lists for different people; allocate a spending budget for every recipient; view helpful statistics on how much you spend; attach pictures, notes, and links for each gift; mark gifts as purchased and wrapped; and backup and restore lists on Google Drive. And don't worry about curious snoopers trying to guess their gifts before the big day because your lists can be password protected.

Christmas Gift List is a great way to keep track of your gift giving this Christmas season.

Although not Christmas-specific, Giftster (browser, Android, iOS) is a very popular universal wish list app that boasts two million users. It lets you add items from any website, create private lists, and share public lists with others.

Giftster helps you create a two-way gift registry so everyone in your group can view one another's wish lists.

If you're looking to turn gifting into a creative and fun holiday event, why not set up an online Secret Santa gift exchange? Elfster (browser, Android, iOS) lets you do exactly that—no matter where the gift senders and recipients are located in the world.

All you need to do is provide the names and email addresses of the Secret Santa participants. Here's how it works:

Participants will receive an email invitation to sign up on Elfster and join the Secret Santa event. Each participant can create their own wish list from hundreds of online shops.The site will automatically generate pairings among the participants. Each Secret Santa purchases a gift for their recipient within the spending limit specified by the event organizer. Then, on the date of the event, gifts are exchanged and Secret Santa identities are revealed (although you can choose to remain anonymous)!

Elfster let's Secret Santa organizers create and manage virtual Christmas gift exchanges for participants from anywhere in the world.

Light up your Christmas: Design and e-greeting apps

Whether you're sending holiday ecards, posting a Christmas party invitation on your social media channel, or adding some extra sparkle to your Christmas email and signature, there's no shortage of tools to help you get your Christmas design projects off the ground.

Blue Mountain, Punchbowl, and Greetings Island (all available on browser, Android, and iOS) give you tons of high-quality, customizable ecards that you can send to family, friends, and colleagues—completely free! You can send the cards as-is or replace the generic greeting with your own personal message.

Blue Mountain offers a large selection of Christmas cards in a variety of categories—from funny to heartfelt to musical.

Canva (browser, Android, iOS) is a great online graphic design tool that offers both power and simplicity. With a wealth of design templates, you can create just about any type of design—social media posts, invitations, posters, cards, presentations, and much more—even if you're “artistically challenged”. Although a Pro version is available with premium content and features, there's more than enough in the free plan to create any design, so you can jingle all the way!

Canva provides you with plenty of free Christmas templates to serve up some holiday cheer.

If you're looking for some quality stock images for your holiday design project, the first names that come to mind are probably iStock and Shutterstock. But these are primarily paid sites.

For a free option, you can't go wrong with Unsplash. With more than three million (mostly free) hand-picked hi-res photos submitted by over 300,000 professional and aspiring photographers, you're sure to find that cheerful Christmas image for your design project.

Unsplash gives you a searchable library of more than three million hi-res photos that have been submitted by over 300,000 photographers.

Vecteezy is a stock photo site with a very powerful search filtering tool. It has the standard filters—content type, paid or free content, photo orientation—but what makes it truly unique is its ability to filter by color or hex color code, so you can find a photo to suit the exact palette you're after.

Vecteezy's powerful search filtering can help you find that perfect shade of Christmas red.

Get into the Christmas mood: Entertainment apps

Looking for some holiday tunes to set the proper atmosphere for your Christmas party or dinner? AccuRadio (browser, Android, iOS) is a free, ad-supported online radio service that offers thousands of music channels curated by actual humans, not algorithms.

With dozens of different holiday-specific channels—from Old-Fashioned Christmas to Christmas Around the World to Classical Christmas Instrumental—AccuRadio will surely have something for every musical taste. There are even channels that play multiple versions of the same Christmas song 24/7 (while this can get repetitive, we’re not judging you!)

AccuRadio's Christmas music radio stations will quench your thirst for holiday cheer with Christmas classics, new releases, and specialty channels.

Those of you looking for some interactive Christmas fun don't have to look any further than Google's Santa Tracker. Inspired by NORAD Tracks Santa, which has been around since 1955, the Google Santa Tracker has plenty to offer—for the young and the young at heart!

The site's filled with fun Christmas-themed activities that let kids of all ages play, watch, and learn. There's even an educational game that teaches kids how to code in Javascript. And, of course, on Christmas Eve the site starts tracking Santa's journey as he delivers goodies to kids all over the world.

The Google Santa Tracker offers kids of all ages plenty of fun and educational Christmas-themed activities.

There's nothing quite like cozying up next to a roaring fire with a cup of hot cocoa on a cold wintry day. But what do you do if you don't have a fireplace?

Check out Pluto TV (browser, Android, iOS), a free streaming television service, and experience the next best thing. In addition to hundreds of non-Christmas channels, the site's “Seasons Greetings” offerings feature round-the-clock Christmas movies; crackling fireplaces with and without accompanying Christmas music; and videos of Christmas trees, lights, and other decorations.

Load up Pluto TV's fireplace, maximize your screen, and cozy up with your favorite book this Christmas.

So, as the year winds down, don't forget to send off a friendly merry Christmas email to everyone—in your personal and professional life—and express your gratitude for all they've contributed throughout the year.

Happy holidays from all of us at Mailbird! We hope this joyous season fills you with love, happiness, and laughter!