These best holiday apps help preparations for the festive season
The holiday season is always the best time of the year to spend time with family and friends. Especially Thanksgiving, Christmas, and celebrating the New Year are wonderful. However, it can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that need doing. From Thanksgiving feasting and the grocery shopping involved, inviting folk over, Black Friday sales, thinking of gift ideas, buying Christmas gifts, making travel plans, decorating the house, keeping the kids amused, and maybe planning a New Year’s Eve party, just thinking of it all is enough to bring us out in cold sweat! Luckily, there are some great holiday apps around to make it easier, so you can spend more time enjoying the celebrations.
What are the best android holiday apps for festive season?
We’ve spent a reasonable amount of time looking at the myriad of apps available to produce our selection of the best apps for the holiday season to get things done. These free apps for the holiday season are something you need to get organized.
The Coupons App
Some people love the hustle and bustle of stores during the holiday season, while others prefer to shop at home using their smartphone or tablet. Either way, the sheer amount of shopping can seem like a mammoth task, so one thing that can ease the pain is getting a bargain. Whether you’re shopping for gifts, for your home, or simply to treat yourself, Shopular is a hugely popular app that will help you to get the best deals. The app will provide you with coupons and weekly ads from well-known stores, including Walgreens, Macy’s, Target, and Kohl’s, and covers more than a thousand US malls.
If you want to shop online, there’s an opportunity to earn 25% cashback, or if you want to go out to shop at the stores, the app will automatically appear on arrival at the mall and show the best deals and coupons as you shop. The coupons don’t need to be printed out as they are redeemed directly from your phone, and the app has an easy-to-navigate interface. This is one of our favorite shopping apps, and it’s really well worth using during the holiday season or all year round.
Any.do
If you feel like your brain is getting saturated trying to remember everything you still have to get done, then Any.Do could be the right app for you. It’s an excellent note taking app for productivity with a clean, uncluttered interface that will help to make your life a whole lot easier at this time of year. It features a daily planner, a to-do list, reminders, and a calendar. Hence, it is extremely useful whether you’re trying to remember to pick up laundry, clean out those cupboards that some family members insist on looking in, borrow that large roasting dish from Mom, shine your champagne glasses, or simply want a reminder to pick up Uncle Chuck at the airport.
The latest update to the app added the option to create an event, useful if you’re planning a party or perhaps New Year fireworks, and the app also includes a home screen widget, so it’s easy to see those reminders and things you have left to do.
Food Network Kitchen
This is a great food app featuring recipes from your Food Network favorites. It provides recently aired recipes and those airing right now, and there are likely to be plenty of holiday season recipes to interest you over the coming weeks and months. There are over 70,000 recipes, and you can search for specific recipes, by course, or by the chef, or simply browse the many great ideas available. You’ll find the basics such as a Thanksgiving roast turkey dinner, cookies, sweet potato recipes, some great dessert dishes, festive cocktails, and much more.
You can share recipes with others or save them for your own collection, and this Food Network app also helps with your grocery shopping list as recipe ingredients can be saved ready for when you shop. The recipes are clear and easy to follow. However, video recipes are only available to view in the U.S.
KAYAK
For many of us, when we think of Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year, we associate it with trying to get home for Christmas or perhaps having people to stay. The KAYAK app is a great all-around travel app that will assist you in making your holiday season travel plans go smoothly. It gives information and deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars with easy, secure, and convenient booking. One of the best aspects of this travel app is the additional information it provides, such as security wait times (so you need to know whether to leave early for the airport), terminal maps, and flight status updates so you know just when that special someone is arriving.
Flightradar24
The holiday season is the busiest time for airports and airline operators and also, a lot of changes happen in schedules. So it’s important to track flights and bookings to get notified of any changes. Flightradar24 is one of the best flight tracking apps out there. With a slick interface, it does the job quickly and efficiently. Users can quickly find a flight with the number or use the code for the airport/airline. We particularly like its control over trips and flights that gives detailed flight information such as flight status, route, estimated time of arrival, the actual time of departure, and other stats. It also delivers quick notifications. The ability to view real-time aircraft moves on the map is a pleasure to see.
OpenTable
Having a nice dinner with loved ones brings great pleasure during the holiday season but we all know how difficult it is to get a table without prior reservation. OpenTable is one of the best restaurant reservations app that lets you save money with discounts and deals across fifty thousand restaurants globally. The search feature works really well and helps to narrow down the choice of places by filtering area, menu, cuisine style, and much more. Also, booking a table is very easy with just a few stapes and allows sharing the RSVP with other parties. Another useful option is the ability to keep a record of your dietary preferences, stats, and Dining Points to redeem rewards and travel deals on apps like KAYAK.
Amazon Shopping and more
Amazon is the mother of all shopping apps and it is known for number of shopping festival during various holiday season in many countries that brings incredible deals and discounts. Since many of the big brands now offers a dedicated app, you should also keep an eye on your favorite retailer’s app.
Elfster
One of our biggest headaches every Christmas is keeping track of gifts we’ve already purchased, are yet to buy, who we’re giving to, and what to get. This app really helps out in this respect as it enables you to enter who you want to buy for, how much you want to spend on each person, mark it once you have the gift, and mark it yet again once it’s wrapped and ready to give! You can also send a Christmas list via Twitter, Evernote, email, and more, and personalize each entry with a note, picture, or links for gift ideas.
It’s easy to overspend during the holiday season, so using this app will help you set a budget and keep track of what you’ve spent already. The stats page also shows details such as gifts left to buy, left to wrap, and days to Christmas. As well as all this, you can protect your Xmas list with a password, so if a member of your family or a friend is trying to snoop and see what you’ve got them, they won’t be able to find out. A handy feature of this app is that it automatically archives your list on New Year’s Day each year, carrying over the people on your current list.
Christmas Songs
Christmas songs app is an obvious choice of the best apps for the holiday season to get in the festive spirit by listening to Christmas music while preparing for the holiday season. The app offers a great library of cheerful songs that can also be set as ringtones and assigned to different contacts, set as alarms and message tones, and more. Just a few of the music choices available are Jingle Bells, Away in a Manger, Sleigh Bells, Joy to the World, and Silent Night. For other holidays you should check out our choice of best music streaming apps.
House Decoration
Decorating the house for Christmas time is the most satisfying job that everyone loves. House Decoration app offers crafts and decorations and great ideas to decorate your home for the holidays. You can also save money on in-store decorations, which is a big bonus! There are plenty of decorations in this app with step-by-step instructions like Christmas tree decorations, home décor, Santa Claus, candles, bells, snowflakes, snowmen, and reindeer. We also recommend using the apps from our list of Home Decorating Apps & Interior Design Apps.
Magic Piano
A bonus app to cheer up with holiday spirit! Fill your house with classic Christmas music. Magic Piano is one best easy-to-learn and plays piano apps that will let you play free holiday songs as well as timeless classics. While sitting with family, ask everyone to play songs and see who can do it perfectly. This could be a whole lot of fun in the family get-together.
Any or all of these apps should help you to get ready for the holiday season. After all, holidays are meant for relaxation in the company of those closest to you, not running yourself into the ground getting increasingly frazzled as the season progresses. As well as practical holiday apps that will help with shopping, planning, decorating, and shopping, there are also apps that you can sit down and share with the kids and get all the family involved. If you have enjoyed our ideas for the best apps for the holiday season, let us know which you found most useful or recommend that we haven’t included in our top choices.
