Making a full holiday feast for guests can be daunting, for some perhaps even terrifying. The world, and especially Hallmark movies, is full of holiday disaster stories: ruined roasts, failed desserts, steamed hams. But I'm not bragging when I say that the first holiday dinner I prepared for my extended family—a little early this year—was an unmitigated success.
My aunt couldn't stop talking about the black pepper in the biscuits and the sage on the carrots. My uncle went in for the turkey and the apple-sausage stuffing. My father didn't speak at all, unless prompted. He just ate and ate. This was a compliment.
But of course, I had cheated. I had ordered my holiday in the mail—one of the new breed of holiday meal kits.
The meal was genuinely home-cooked, of course, prepared mostly from scratch. But the entire seven-platter feast—its ingredients and recipes—had arrived two days before, in a box large enough to house a primal cut of beef. It was a full family holiday feast in a box: a seven-course $200 “Chef's Table” meal kit available from sister meal delivery plans Sunbasket and Gobble that's now been updated for Christmas and New Year with a Rastelli's prime rib roast.
Sunbasket is among a new bounty of meal kit companies that aim to ease the stress of the holidays by doing the planning and the shopping for you—big meal boxes tailor-made for those who still want to make a home-cooked meal but for whom the prospect of planning a vast and complicated feast is prohibitive. In fact, two weeks later I cooked another holiday meal from Blue Apron, this time for my sister's family.
Here was my experience with Sunbasket, HelloFresh, and Blue Apron—and some of the other Thanksgiving meal delivery options to get your whole Thanksgiving meal delivered to your home.
Updated December 16, 2025: We’ve updated for December holidays and added a review of HelloFresh's holiday market offerings. We also updated prices, ordering deadlines, and offerings throughout.
Want meal kits for more everyday occasions? See WIRED's guides to the best meal delivery services, and the best plant-based meal delivery kits.
The Blue Apron à la Carte Holiday Meal Kit
Available till December 29. Order a week (or more) in advance to ensure dish delivery, and to avoid sell-out.
Blue Apron, one of the OG meal kits in the US, has undergone a wholesale transformation this year. One of the biggest changes is that subscriptions are no longer required, and à la carte meal ordering is possible—indeed, it's now my favorite no-subscription meal kit offering. What this also means is that you can order individual holiday recipe kits to prep fresh at home, without ever setting foot in a crowded grocery store.
For Christmas week, this will include a 3-pound roast beef tenderloin with sherry-Dijon pan sauce ($110), plus most of the same Blue Apron holiday dishes I cooked for my family for a Thanksgiving feast this year. These included a truly excellent casserole's worth of truffle-oiled Southern mac and cheese ($20), almond apple crumb pie ($15), crispy roasted potatoes ($8), challah rolls with maple butter ($8), and roasted brussels sprouts with pistachios ($10). With a meat main course, this all made for a surprisingly delicious feast fit for at least eight people. Probably even 10, if you add an extra order of potatoes.
Blue Apron has a couple singular merits among holiday meal kits I've tested. One is simple: You can order sides a la carte, without needing to be a subscriber to the meal service. This means you can put together a delicious scratch-made stuffing without your feet dusting the door of a packed pre-holiday supermarket. Just make sure you secure your order soon: Thanksgiving sides sold out fast this year! (Click to Christmas or New Year week, and order ahead.)
The other is that if you do order a whole feast, Blue Apron's recipes split their prep evenly among stovetop, countertop, and oven—meaning that unlike a lot of holiday feasts, I never had to schedule oven space like it was an audience with the Pope. Pricing is pretty reasonable: I put together a seven-course Thanksgiving feast for $130 that feeds eight. The Christmas or New Year version, with three pounds of prime beef instead of turkey, would be more like $170. Beef is beef: It costs.
Expect a seven-course meal to take three hours' prep. But the prep, for me, was easy and mostly stress-free. The hardest part was halving a bunch of brussels sprouts and cubing a few potatoes. And so I was free to crack a beer by the time the meat got near the oven. I'm not sure it was quite as luxe or as inventive as Sunbasket's $200 Thanksgiving feast (see below). But the Blue Apron meals cost a lot less—and you don't have to order what you don't want. Holiday dishes are available to order through the week of December 29.
The Sunbasket Chef’s Table Holiday
Order by December 16 for Christmas Delivery, or by December 22 for New Year's delivery.
Sunbasket's Thanksgiving meal box was the first full holiday feast I cooked for my family—and it was a corker, a seven-dish feast that felt like a genuine extravagance. More so than the holiday meals I've prepped from HelloFresh or Blue Apron, the many-course, mostly-organic holiday meal kit from Sunbasket (and sister meal company Gobble) felt like actual luxury. Each dish contained a little glow-up, an added ingredient that made it seem a little extra.
The holiday kit includes a ready-to-cook, 4-pound prime rib roast from Rastelli's, a root veggie and brussels sprout medley, mashed potatoes, bacon-spiked creamed greens, biscuits with rosemary and Gruyère, and a foursome of little chocolate cakes with cherry-orange compote.
Sunbakset's holiday meal boxes arrive arranged in an insulated box, with each dish wrapped in a paper bag and a stack of recipes and instructions on top. For Christmas, order by December 16, for delivery ahead of Christmas. Order by December 22 for New Year's. Make sure to reserve a lot of shelf space in your fridge. You'll need it.
While it might save on stress and planning, Sunbasket's meal box was far from labor-free in my experience. Sunbasket says to expect 2.5 hours of prep. As with all meal kits and all recipe writers, expect a little more. But not by much! With a double oven, or a good accessory oven like a big Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, I was able to prep the Thanksgiving kit in a little over three hours with some help. The December kit contains a couple of pre-prepared dishes (mashed potatoes and creamed greens), so you might fare even better than I did on Thanksgiving.
You'll also need a wealth of serving dishes and platters—though this is to be expected when cooking six dishes. Now for the good news: The Sunbasket meal is not at all difficult or advanced in terms of prep requirements. And indeed, the mashed potatoes will just need a nuke, but are still actual potatoes rather than some kind of dehydrated mixture.
Expect the sides to involve the most hefty preparation, largely cleaning and chopping veggies and building up pan sauces. Nothing too intense, but it will take time. But in my experience on Thanksgiving, the process was fairly seamless, and the kit comes with instructions to help you plan your order of operations for maximum efficiency—cooking some dishes side by side at the same temperature. The Thanksgiving meal relied a bit too heavily on the oven, which meant a lot of logistics. But the December holiday meal has fewer dishes that require long roasting, so this may be less of an issue.
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But I can vouch for the results on Sunbasket's holiday kits. They are delicious, with hardly a bum dish in my meal. And while nominally, a Sunbasket meal feeds a mere four or six people, I could have fed eight happily with the box I got in November.
At $245 for the Chef's Classic Meal, this remains far from inexpensive for a meal you still must cook yourself, but the Sunbasket's box I tried was also far more bountiful than what I would have planned—and indeed, the most indulgent of holiday meal kits I've prepped.
For Small Families: HelloFresh à la Carte
Subscriber-only. Order by December 18 for Christmas delivery.
Big meal delivery boxes are less ideal for smaller families, of course. That's where I like HelloFresh.
HelloFresh did offer a full holiday meal box through its subscriber-only “market” for Thanksgiving—with thoughtfully well-coordinated mains and sides. Among all holiday meal delivery feasts I've tested, HelloFresh's chefs were the most considerate of the fact you probably don't live in a commercial kitchen with unlimited prep bowls and pans. Each recipe offered little instructions for how to best reuse your cookware among various stuffings, gravies, and meats.
Lord, I appreciated this. Or at least I felt seen, as they used to like to say on Twitter.
But for Christmas week, HelloFresh offers a nice option to prep special meals for much smaller gatherings. For the week December 20 to 26 (order by December 17), HelloFresh offers some holiday-style meals on their regular menu as “Festive Premium” options, available at a per-serving upcharge. Among them, I prepped a nicely sumptuous maple-rosemary half-chicken with fingerling potatoes, carrots, and lemon-pepper sauce that felt, indeed, festive. It was a good old-fashioned Midwestern hearth-style feast with a little extra zing, with a beautifully browned bird and a simple sauce. (Actually, I probably would have dialed back the lemon juice ever so slightly on a second cook, but it was still pretty tasty.)
That meal is heavy on prep but beautifully presented for a small family. Kinda Dickensian, even. The other “festive premium” meals include a balsamic-and-fig ribeye with potatoes, brussels, and crostini; and pistachio-crusted lamb chops with mashed potatoes and green beans.
And while these meals require that you sign up for a subscription, HelloFresh doesn't require any commitment moving forward. So you can just sign up at an introductory price and have yourself a nice little holiday by ordering three dishes. If you've never subscribed, this will be a handy 50 percent off, meaning you can get three meals for four people for $71, or $36 for two people, plus upcharges for the more extravagant holiday dishes. The other meals could be dinner for another day, easy prep-and-bakes for lazy post-holiday convalescence, or even add-ons for a more extravagant holiday feast. (Previous subscribers still get a discount, but not as big, about 25 percent off instead of half off.)
You may end up deciding to keep your subscription beyond the holidays. I've personally found that winter months in particular are a nice time to have meal kits delivered, because I shudder at the thought of entering a cold, rainy world to get grocery ingredients. Which leads me to needless upcharged $50 DoorDash meals, and self-remonstration. But especially, if you're at home with a small family, it's nice to have a little special meal you wouldn't have prepared when left to your own devices. Or at least, I enjoyed my maple chicken.
A Charcuterie Board Delivery Service
Ships overnight, but ordering 48 hours ahead is recommended.
As a middle-aged person for whom cheese remains one of the few consistent joys, I find myself putting together a lot of charcuterie boards. For holidays, for parties at my house, for parties at others’ houses, or even just for quick dinners. Regardless of the board size, the costs can add up fast, especially once you’ve factored in frills like pickles, dried fruit, chocolate, and chutneys. To say nothing of the time outlay for slicing and arranging. Boarderie, the mail-order instant charcuterie board hyped by Shark Tank shark Lori Grenier, isn't the least expensive option, but it is one of the most impressive.
Boards are available with custom cheese shapes (including numbers of your choice) or holiday themes, including Christmas, Jewish holidays (no meat), and New Year's. Though they're shipped overnight, this is via FedEx, so delays can—and often—happen, so make sure you give yourself a couple of days on the front end. I've had Boarderie twice now for parties, and both arrived fresh with still partially frozen ice packs—in the first case, despite sitting on my porch for half an afternoon; the second, despite a nearly day-long delay. The large size comes with 37 components, including 15 cheeses (fig-and-rose goat cheese, wasabi horseradish cheddar), four meats (black truffle salami, chorizo), five kinds of nuts, eight fruits and pickles, and three boxes of different types of crackers. There are also marmalades and candies and a disposable set of bamboo picks, spoons, and tongs.
All of it comes shrink-wrapped in its own sections, in little bamboo and/or cardboard boats set into a reusable acacia wood tray. All you have to do is unwrap the sections and arrange the crackers. There are three different board sizes (Classic serves 3-4, Medium serves 5-7, and Large serves 10-14, so long as we're talking grazing portions). There’s also the option for add-ons like baked brie ($129) or fresh honeycomb ($19). Again, a bargain it is not, but for a gift or special occasion, this is sure to be a hit. —Kat Merck
More Holiday Meal Delivery
We haven't yet tried the holiday items below, but these are some options from meal kits I've tried and can recommend.
Order by December 17.
You'll have to subscribe to get it. But like sister meal plan HelloFresh, organic-focused Green Chef offers a number of “Holiday at Home” dishes like sirloin steak with porcini cream sauce or a walnut chicken with honey-thyme sauce. Green Chef also offers little holiday add-ons on its weekly menu that include dinner rolls and desserts, including an orange-cranberry crisp.
Likewise on the regular subscription menu for Christmas, Martha Stewart-endorsed meal plan Marley Spoon offers a “Holiday Mix-and-Match” that amounts to a self-selected feast. This can include a “Martha Stewart ham” kit with biscuits and mustard sauce, or a beef tenderloin roast. But what's truly impressive about Marley's menu is the add-on and side offerings, including charcuterie boards and shrimp platters and scalloped potatoes and the widest range of desserts I've seen from any kit. (Cookies! Gingerbread cake! Cannoli cake! Oh my!)
While I haven't tried Marley's holiday offerings in particular, Marley is the meal kit I recommend as the best nuts-and-bolts cooking among all meal kits I've tried. And the mix-and-match selection is the broadest I've seen anywhere. Sign up with an introductory discount, and it's likely a heck of a spread—one you choose for yourself. Here's the advance menu. Search for the word “Holiday” and you'll find yourself swimming in options.
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