Lifestyle | boon. for Christmas Challenge

This post was sponsored by boon.

As Christmas has grown closer, the pressures to entertain, buy gifts and be festive mounts. Last year I hosted Christmas for the first time, but luckily that was a one off. This year I am back to hosting a few friends in the run-up to the big day.

This year I have accepted the boon. Christmas 'Host with the Most' challenge. If you aren't aware of boon., it's a payment app that works with Apple pay, allowing you to pay with your iPhone or Apple watch. If you haven't used Apple pay, it's so simple. Once you have set it up with your card, just hold your phone over the contactless card machine, select the boon. virtual card, fingerprint and you are done.

Best of all, it's not associated with your card or bank account - great to use to budget your spending. You simply add credit and go. Best of all there isn't the usual £30 limit on the contactless spend, making shopping easy and convenient.

Anyway, back to the challenge....

Buy a secret Santa gift 

Secret Santa shopping can be hard, luckily, in Brighton and Hove there's a plethora of charity shops to hunt for treasure in. My secret Santa person is a vintage fashion lover, which I find quite tricky, but when I saw this old leopard brooch I knew I'd hit the jackpot.

A Christmas game

To keep my guest entertained I picked up a few bits. As well as grabbing some props for pictures, I grabbed a holiday classic - Who am I. This provided us with loads of laughter, especially when someone got Boris Johnson!

Festive nibbles

I'm not going to lie, as someone who has no real religion, to me Christmas is about the food - although we now eat pigs in blankets all year round, there are still some Christmas essentials that I look forward too. Waitrose was our food shop this year, after being a bit disappointed with Tesco's selection. I grabbed mini yorkshire puddings filled with a mini roast dinner, toffee apple stuffing balls (OMG, yummy) and some Chorizo wheels. These all went down great with our guests.

Room decorations

We added a few additions to our tree (our first ever real one) this year. These light up initial decorations are from M&S - they were in the 3 for 2 offer so we got some extra ones to use a place-holders for our guests at the dinner table.

Christmas jumper

Lastly, this is a quick snap I took after buying my Star Wars inspired Christmas Jumpers - Can you spot Yoda and the Tauntons?

If you want to win some free boon. credit to spend this Christmas head over to the boon Facebook to enter their Secret Santa contest! You can download the boon. app here and set yourself up with a virtual card in minutes.

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