Christmas with a dog: what to sort out beforehand

Print my Pet · 25. September 2026 · 9 min read·Updated 28.09.2026

Golden Retriever pet portrait in Watercolour style as a framed canvas

Christmas Eve, just after six. The doorbell goes for the fourth time, coats are piling up in the hallway, in the kitchen someone is pulling the roast out of the oven. And somewhere between twelve pairs of legs stands a dog who has not known what to do with himself for two hours.

That is where most Christmas problems with dogs begin. Not out of malice, not from a lack of training. But because on a single evening everything is different at once: smells, volume, people, mealtimes, rules. A dog does not read that as a celebration. He reads it as a state of emergency.

The good news: almost all of it can be sorted out beforehand. Not in a big project, but in about twenty minutes, spread over the weeks before. Here is what really counts, where the usual warnings exaggerate, and what you will no longer have to argue about on the 24th.

The most dangerous things are not at the tree, but on the table

It smells good, it is within reach, and it sits around for hours while everyone talks. Four things are really relevant here. For three of them it is worth looking at the numbers, because they take away the panic and show where the limit actually lies.

Chocolate: the type decides, not the amount alone

The problematic substance is called theobromine. According to veterinary literature, mild symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhoea begin at around 20 mg theobromine per kilogram of body weight. From 40 mg/kg it gets serious, and the lethal dose is given as 250 to 500 mg/kg.

It gets interesting with the content. Milk chocolate contains roughly 0.5 to 2.3 mg theobromine per gram, while dark chocolate with 55 percent cocoa contains 5 to 8.5 mg. For a dog weighing ten kilos that means in practice: a few pieces of milk chocolate are unpleasant and usually manageable. Twenty to fifty grams of dark chocolate, so a quarter to half a bar, are already in the critical range.

The milk chocolate advent calendar is therefore a completely different problem from the bar of fine dark chocolate that a guest brings as a gift and leaves on the coffee table. If something has disappeared, it helps the vet on the phone enormously if you can name the cocoa content and the approximate amount. So do not throw away the packaging straight away.

Stollen, raisins, grapes

This is the underestimated danger, because it looks so harmless. Raisins attack the kidneys, and much more strongly than fresh grapes, because they are concentrated: around 2.6 grams of raisins per kilogram of body weight are considered critical, compared with 10 to 30 grams for grapes.

The unpleasant part is not the number, but what the literature says about it. Why some dogs react severely and others not at all is still unexplained to this day. That is why there is no reliable safe threshold. Christmas stollen, fruit bread, rum balls, panettone: all full of it. If your dog has got hold of a piece, this is not a case for wait and see, but for a phone call.

Anything with xylitol in it

Birch sugar sounds like the healthy option and is the opposite for dogs. Xylitol triggers a massive release of insulin, and blood sugar plummets. As little as 0.1 grams per kilogram of body weight is considered toxic, and the effect sets in about thirty minutes after ingestion. That is not much time.

The danger here is less the Christmas baking itself than what is lying around on the side: sugar-free biscuits, chewing gum in a guest's coat pocket, sweetened nut butter, some cough sweets. A glance at the ingredients list is enough.

The roast and what goes on around it

Onions and garlic are in almost every sauce and damage the red blood cells in dogs. Cooked poultry bones splinter, raw ones do not, which is why the rest of the goose carcass is not a reward but a risk. And alcohol acts many times faster in a dog than in a person, including in the form of egg liqueur that someone kindly poured into a shallow bowl and put on the floor.

Lots of warnings about the tree, little differentiation

With the poinsettia you can genuinely breathe a sigh of relief. The commercially available cultivated forms are considered only slightly toxic. Anyone who nibbles on it is more likely to get an irritated mucous membrane from the milky sap than a poisoning. With puppies, who still put everything in their mouths, a call to the vet is still sensible, simply because a young stomach can cope with less.

Two other things are more serious. First, tinsel, gift ribbons and angel hair. Threads of this kind are notorious in veterinary medicine as linear foreign bodies: they can get stuck in the intestine, and then they do not come out again on their own. Second, the water in the tree stand, to which many people add a freshness agent. For a dog it is simply a drinking bowl at floor level that nobody guards.

Candles, on the other hand, are rarely a fire problem and often a tail problem. A medium-sized dog carries his tail at roughly the height of a coffee table. Anyone who puts tealights there has reckoned without the wagging radius. By the way, the same goes for glasses of red wine.

For a dog, visitors are not a joy but work

Even a friendly, well socialised dog is working on an evening like this. Every new person wants to be greeted, sized up, observed. After three hours that is no longer fun but exhaustion, and exhausted dogs do things they otherwise do not do: they snap at children's hands, steal from the table, bark at the door.

Two points help more than anything else. The dog must not have to greet anybody. If he would rather stay lying down, he stays lying down, and nobody goes over to him. And children who come to visit need a clear instruction: no disturbing him in the crate, no sitting on his back, no holding him tight. That is not strictness towards the children, but the condition for the evening to end well for everyone.

Six things that take two minutes each

The real trick with Christmas with a dog is not a safety topic but a planning topic.

Set up the retreat earlier, not on the evening itself. A blanket or crate in a room that is guaranteed to stay empty on the 24th, and two weeks beforehand. A dog who is supposed to get used to a new spot only in the middle of the chaos will not get used to anything.

Look up the number of the emergency vet service. Over the holidays your practice is closed, and a number like that is hard to find when things have to happen fast. Look it up once, hang it on the fridge, done.

Put the big walk before the visitors, not after. A well-exercised dog is a relaxed dog. A proper walk in the afternoon works better than any well-meant calming measure and costs nothing.

One announcement to all guests, once, at the start. Nobody feeds from the table. If you state that as a rule beforehand, you do not have to step in eight times individually and seem impolite eight times.

Name one person who is responsible. When it gets too much, exactly this person takes the dog to the quiet room. Without an agreement, nobody feels responsible on an evening like this, because everyone assumes someone else is already watching.

Clear away wrapping paper and ribbons immediately. Not onto the pile next to the sofa, but into a closed bag. This is the simplest of the six points and the one that everyone reliably forgets.

The first Christmas with a puppy

If your dog has only been with you for a few months, one more point comes on top of everything above: a puppy cannot regulate himself in the chaos. He does not get calm when he is tired, he gets hectic. Between visiting phases he needs real sleep breaks in the quiet room, even if he does not seem tired at that moment. Better once too early than once too late.

What else is coming up in the first weeks, we have put together in the free puppy starter pack (Welpen-Startpaket). If you want to go deeper: Welpenerziehung & Junghundtraining (Puppy Training & Young Dog Training) deals, among other things, with exactly this question: how to teach a young dog calm instead of expecting it from him. All titles are on the books page.

And the present?

One last thought, because it is on the table on an evening like this anyway: most of what dog people get for Christmas is once again something for the dog. Another collar, another toy, another treat tin. Kindly meant and forgotten in three months.

What stays is something that shows the dog. A picture on the wall does not vanish into any drawer, it hangs there and is seen every day, even in five years. We design it in the style of your choice from a photo you already have on your phone. You see the result as a preview before anything is printed, and if the ear position is not right or the expression does not sit, we change it. That costs nothing extra.

If you want to browse: in the Christmas gifts for animal lovers you will find the designs that suit December, and under dog portraits all styles and materials sit side by side. For a printed picture, it is best to count back two to three weeks from the photo to the box in your hallway, which leaves room for a change. The preview itself is there in 24 to 48 hours.

And then, a week later, comes New Year's Eve. For many dogs that is the harder evening of the two. That too can be prepared for, and again not on the day itself.