5 ChatGPT Prompts To Try This Christmas – Forbes
ChatGPT can help get your Christmas dinner timings spot on
If there’s any time of year where we need a little AI assistance, it’s Christmas. ChatGPT can genuinely help you with the festive chores and activities, helping everything to run smoothly over the holidays.
Here, then, are five ChatGPT prompts that will make your Christmas even easier. All prompts are written in italics in the instructions below.
Making sure you get everything in the oven at the right time is the key to a great Christmas dinner. ChatGPT can help you plan here, ensuring nobody ends up gnawing on a raw turkey leg.
It pays to be as specific as possible with this prompt. For example, you might ask ChatGPT:
Help me time the cooking of my Christmas dinner. I want everything cooked by 3pm. I have the following items to cook:
A 5kg turkey
Roast potatoes
Stuffing (not in the turkey)
Roasted carrots
Roasted Brussels sprouts
Boiled peas (from frozen)
Gravy
The weight of the turkey (or any meat) is particularly important, as that will determine the cooking time and when everything else should go in.
Armed with all the information above, ChatGPT should prepare a detailed cooking plan, telling you when every item should be cooked, for how long and at what temperature. The instructions ChatGPT provided for me were accurate, but do double-check all instructions, especially for meat where safety is paramount.
Once ChatGPT has provided your written plan, you can ask it 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 needs to be cooked:
ChatGPT’s Gantt chart of Christmas dinner cooking times
If you use ChatGPT Plus, you can ask the AI to make that chart downloadable and print it out for use in the kitchen, without having to keep opening your smartphone with greasy hands!
Once the dinner is out the way, it’s time to get the games going. Family quizzes are a Christmas staple, but this year you don’t have to go to the bother of researching and writing questions yourself—you’ve got an AI assistant who can knock one up in seconds.
Here, it pays to be as specific as possible about the topic and type of quiz that you want to create. It’s also wise to give ChatGPT instructions on how you want to receive the answers. Normally, if you just ask for the quiz questions, it won’t immediately provide the answers until prompted to do so. This can be handy if you want to join in with the quiz yourself.
If you just want to play quizmaster, you might enter a prompt such as:
Create a 20 question Christmas family quiz. Make it about US TV sitcoms. Provide the questions and four multiple choice answers for each. Put an asterisk next to the correct answer on each question.
ChatGPT not only created the quiz in my test, but each of the questions were holiday themed. For example, the first question was:
In “Friends,” what does Ross famously dress up as to teach Ben about Hanukkah?
Read through the questions before you start the quiz, as two of the questions in my quiz were very similar. You can always ask ChatGPT to generate extra questions, if required.
Let AI help you mix the Christmas cocktails
By Christmas evening, after tucking into the food and wine, most people are happy just to remember their own name, let alone how to make a cocktail. With ChatGPT at hand, you don’t need to.
You can ask ChatGPT how to make a specific cocktail and instantly receive full instructions. You won’t only get the ingredients, but the quantities to use and instructions on how to mix it. Who knew that “muddling” mint leaves was a thing when making a Mojito?
The other approach here is to give ChatGPT a list of all the available drinks in your cabinet and let it come up with 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 dream up its own cocktails, and they didn’t seem very appealing—one used a combination of all of the above ingredients!
However, when I followed up with:
Are there any classic cocktails that use my ingredients?
Chat GPT was back on track, providing instructions for a Brandy Old Fashioned and Cuba Libre. These did include ingredients that weren’t on my list, but ChatGPT labelled these clearly, and they were common ingredients that you might well have at home, such as sugar and bitters.
Christmas is the time when board games are fished out of the closet, but the rules sheet was inevitably lost in 1987, leading to unwanted squabbles.
If you need clarification on popular board game rules, ChatGPT can help you out. 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 property at the start of a Monopoly game?
It will tell you that no such rule exists.
If you’re completely sketchy on 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 such as Yahtzee, you can even ask ChatGPT to create new scorecards in a printable PDF format.
AI can also breathe new life into those fusty 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
It came up with ten suggestions, including:
All Properties Auctioned: At the beginning of the game, auction all properties instead of allowing players to buy them by landing on them. This speeds up the game and adds a strategic layer right from the start.
That’s two hours of my Christmas Day reclaimed!
This one definitely scrapes a moral boundary, but if you’re running short of time in the post-Christmas rush back to work, but want to thank people for the lovely presents you’ve received, the AI could help you out.
You can give the AI the bare details of a thank you message and let it compose a more fulsome message that you can either copy into an email or print into a letter.
When they were younger, my kids would send thank you cards for their presents, but we would often write out the message for them, so they could copy it in their own handwriting. You could get 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 bought for Ryan. The message should be written from 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 massive thank you for the Xbox Game Pass vouchers you sent me. It was such a cool and awesome surprise!
I’ve already started exploring some new games and can’t wait to dive into even more adventures. It’s like having a whole new world of gaming at my fingertips, and I’m super excited about it. These vouchers are the best gift ever!
Thanks again for being so thoughtful and for making my gaming experience even more fantastic. You’re the best uncle ever!
Take care and see you soon!
Best wishes,
Ryan 🎮🌟
The message is a little long and clichéd in places, but you could easily edit it down. You could also give ChatGPT a specific word limit to prevent it from rambling!