ChatGPT can help you set your Christmas dinner times
If there’s a time of year when we need a little help with AI, it’s Christmas. ChatGPT can truly assist you with festive tasks and activities, helping everything run smoothly during the holidays.
So here are five ChatGPT prompts that will make your Christmas even easier. All prompts are written in italics in the instructions below.
1. Plan Christmas Dinner Perfectly
Making sure everything is in the oven at the right time is the key to a great Christmas dinner. ChatGPT can help you plan here, ensuring no one ends up gnawing on a raw turkey leg.
It’s worth being as specific as possible with this prompt. For example, you can ask ChatGPT:
Help me plan my Christmas dinner. I want everything cooked by 3 p.m. I have the following items to cook:
A 5 kg turkey
Roasted potatoes
Stuffing (not in the turkey)
roasted carrots
Roasted Brussels Sprouts
Boiled peas (frozen)
Sauce
The weight of the turkey (or any other meat) is especially important, as it will determine the cooking time and when everything else needs to be added to it.
Armed with all of the information above, ChatGPT should prepare a detailed cooking plan, telling you when each item should be cooked, for how long, and at what temperature. The instructions ChatGPT provided me were accurate, but double check all instructions, especially for meat where safety is paramount.
Once ChatGPT provides your written plan, you can ask them to make things even simpler with this follow-up prompt:
Can you create a Gantt chart showing when each item should be cooked?
You should end up with something like this, which gives you a clear visual plan of when everything should be cooked:
ChatGPT Gantt Chart of Christmas Dinner Cooking Times
If you use ChatGPT Plus, you can ask the AI to make this chart downloadable and print it for use in the kitchen, without having to open your smartphone with greasy hands!
2. Create a Christmas quiz
Once dinner is over, it’s time to start the games. Family quizzes are a Christmas staple, but this year you don’t have to worry about finding and writing questions yourself: you have an AI assistant that can create one in seconds.
Here it pays to be as specific as possible about the topic and type of quiz you want to create. It’s also a good idea to give ChatGPT instructions on how you want to receive responses. Normally, if you just ask the quiz questions, it won’t immediately provide the answers until you’re prompted. This can be handy if you want to take the quiz yourself.
If you just want to play Quizmaster, you can enter a prompt like:
Create a 20-question Christmas family quiz. Let’s talk about American television sitcoms. Provide the questions and four multiple choice answers for each. Place an asterisk next to the correct answer to each question.
ChatGPT not only created the quiz for my test, but each of the questions was holiday-themed. For example, the first question was:
In “Friends”, what does Ross wear to teach Ben about Hanukkah?
- A) Santa Claus
- B) The holiday armadillo*
- C) A snowman
- D) An elf
Read the questions before starting the quiz, as two of my quiz questions were very similar. You can always ask ChatGPT to generate additional questions, if necessary.
3. Get the Christmas cocktails flowing
Let AI help you make Christmas cocktails
On Christmas Eve, after enjoying food and wine, most people just remember their own name, let alone how to mix a cocktail. With ChatGPT at your fingertips, you don’t need it.
You can ask ChatGPT how to make a specific cocktail and receive complete instructions instantly. You’ll not only get the ingredients, but also the quantities to use and instructions on how to mix them. Who knew that “crushing” mint leaves was a thing when making a Mojito?
The other approach here is to give ChatGPT a list of all the drinks available in your cabinet and let it suggest the cocktails. For example:
Help me create a cocktail. I have the following drinks available: Vodka, Bourbon whiskey, brandy, dark rum, orange juice, cranberry juice, coke.
Now I’ll be honest. When I first tried this prompt, ChatGPT seemed to come up with its own cocktails, and they didn’t seem very appealing: one of them used a combination of all of the ingredients above!
However, when I followed:
Are there any classic cocktails that use my ingredients?
Chat GPT was back on track, providing instructions for a Brandy Old Fashioned and a Cuba Libre. These included ingredients that weren’t on my list, but ChatGPT clearly labeled them, and they were common ingredients that you might very well have at home, like sugar and bitters.
4. Clarify the rules of the board game
Christmas is the time when board games come out of the closet, but the rules were inevitably lost in 1987, leading to unwanted rows.
If you need clarification on the rules of popular board games, ChatGPT can help. It’s a common misconception in Monopoly, for example, that you can’t buy property until you’ve completed a circuit of the board. But if you ask ChatGPT:
Do you have to do a circuit of the board before you can buy a property at the start of a game of Monopoly?
He will tell you that no such rule exists.
If you’re completely vague about the rules of a game, you can ask ChatGPT to give you a summary. For example:
Give me a brief overview of the rules of Yahtzee
If you’ve lost or run out of scorecards for a game like Yahtzee, you can even have ChatGPT create new scorecards in printable PDF format.
AI can also breathe new life into those old board games that can take hours to complete. For example, when I asked ChatGPT to:
Suggest some house rules to make Monopoly more interesting
He made ten suggestions, including:
All properties up for auction: At the start of the game, put all properties up for auction instead of allowing players to buy them by landing on them. This speeds up the game and adds a strategic layer from the start.
That’s two hours of my Christmas day recovered!
5. Write thank you messages
This one definitely crosses the moral line, but if you’re short on time when returning to work after Christmas and want to thank people for the lovely gifts you received, AI could help.
You can give the AI the details of a thank you message and let it write a more comprehensive message that you can either copy into an email or print into a letter.
When they were younger, my kids sent thank you cards for their gifts, but we often wrote the message for them, so they could copy it in their own handwriting. You could ask the AI to do something similar, in much less time than it would take to write messages yourself. For example:
Create a thank you message to Uncle Bryan, thanking him for the Xbox Game Pass vouchers he purchased for Ryan. The message must be written by Ryan, who is 12 years old.
ChatGPT generated the following message:
I hope this message finds you well! I wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you for the Xbox Game Pass vouchers you sent me. It was such a cool and awesome surprise!
I’ve already started exploring new games and can’t wait to dive into even more adventures. It’s like having a whole new gaming world at your fingertips, and I’m very excited about it. These vouchers are the best gift ever!
Thanks again for being so considerate and making my gaming experience even more fantastic. You are the best uncle ever!
Take care and see you soon!
Best wishes,
Ryan 🎮🌟
The post is a bit long and clichéd in places, but you can easily edit it. You can also give ChatGPT a specific word limit to stop it from rambling!