Christmas Cleaning Guide: 3 Top Tips for Festive Spills

Hosting at Christmas can be stressful. Cleaning, decorating, topping up drinks and making up guest bedrooms, not to mention cooking numerous dishes and desserts for twelve people. When dinner is cooked and ready to serve, you might breathe a small sigh of relief. Suddenly, one of these festive spills occurs! Fear not, with our top tips for three common festive spills and how to clean them, you’ll restore your glittering festive sanctuary to its former glory in no time.

How to get mulled wine out of the carpet

Let us begin with an old classic. Red wine on a light-coloured carpet, but let’s make it festive and add the mulled spices and a cinnamon stick! These moments seem to go in slow-motion, and then the red stain starts creeping over your beautiful floor…

Action stations! Speed is of the essence to prevent the stain setting in, quickly remove any lemon slices, star anise or other garnish and grab a dark towel or a wad of kitchen roll. Dab the wine repeatedly to absorb as much excess liquid as you possibly can, dabbing from the outside into the middle. Do NOT rub!

Don’t follow the old wives’ tale and waste white wine by pouring it over the stain. Instead, you could use sparkling water to lift the red wine mark. Some ideas suggest diluted white vinegar if you don’t have any sparkling water in the house. Having pulled as of the stain up as possible with paper towels, next grab salt or baking soda, whichever you have to hand.

Cover the stain liberally with one of these, and then just wait. Resist the urge to rub, wait three minutes and then add some cold water to the salt or baking soda, and then blot the area over and over again with a dry towel to soak the salt and wine mixture up from the floor.

Once the area dries, vacuum the area and all being well the wine mark will have lifted. If not, you can now try a carpet cleaning spray, massaging into the area with a cloth. If all else fails, it could be time to admit defeat, call a professional cleaner and ban the culprit from attending your Christmas drinks party ever again…

How to remove candle wax from the tablecloth

‘Nobody will knock it over’, you thought to yourself, as you added beautiful pillar candles to your chic Christmas table centrepieces. Halfway through the meal, one has just been knocked by an enthusiastic hand – now there’s a pool of wax on the fabric of your festive tablecloth!

The first step is to grab an ice cube from the freezer and rub the wax until it hardens – that way nobody gets burnt, and you can scrape up the solid wax with a spoon. You will then need a paper towel or paper bag (with no ink or writing) and, having placed the paper either side of the tablecloth on the remaining wax stain, get your iron and re-heat the wax. It will absorb onto the paper, and then you can throw it in the wash as normal!

This one isn’t as time-sensitive as the red wine, so there’s no need to disrupt Christmas dinner and send plates of stuffing flying. Wait until people are snoozing or playing boisterous board games after lunch, then quickly disappear to save your tablecloth.

How to clean up tree sap

While not technically a spill, (more of an ooze) this occurrence is not likely to be something you have cleaned up before, while general Christmas foods like chocolate and cranberry sauce are usually relatively easy to lift with warm water and washing up liquid.

Ice is your friend again, for this festive cleaning challenge. If the sap from your Christmas tree is fresh, use ice to gently dry out the patch of tree sap until you can pick it up from the carpet. Alcohol works for this too, (pat, don’t rub) but be aware that it could discolour the carpet, so you might be best to patch test, use sparingly or just use the ice.

If a stain remains, mix up some warm, soapy water using washing up liquid and use to wash the area. The detergent will break down any stickiness from the sap, and you should be left with no marks on the carpet. Celebrate, because your house has just survived another festive season (relatively) unscathed!