It’s the second week of November and your phone is already lighting up. One boarder wants to know if she can ride on Christmas morning. Another is flying out the day after Thanksgiving and asks whether “someone” can keep an eye on his horse. A lesson parent wants to know if you’ll be open the week between Christmas and New Year’s. You haven’t decided yet, and every answer you give by text is an answer you’ll have to remember, repeat, and defend.
Holidays are the one time of year when the horses need exactly the same care and your people need exactly the opposite: time off. Feed doesn’t know it’s Thanksgiving. Water buckets still freeze on December 25. Meanwhile your staff, your family, and you would very much like to be somewhere else.
The good news is that most of the stress isn’t the work itself. It’s the improvising. A written holiday plan, shared before the crunch, turns a dozen awkward negotiations into one clear announcement. Here’s how to build it.
Why Holiday Coverage Goes Wrong at Barns
Most barns don’t have a holiday problem. They have a decision-timing problem. The schedule gets sorted out in the last week, when boarders have already booked travel, staff have already made plans, and you’re the one covering the gap at 5:30 AM on a holiday.
The common failure points look familiar:
- Verbal promises. You told one boarder “of course you can come out Christmas Day,” and now everyone who hears about it expects the same.
- Last-minute staffing. The person you assumed would cover Thursday has plans, and you find out Wednesday night.
- Unwritten feed instructions. The substitute caretaker doesn’t know which horse gets soaked beet pulp, which one can’t have the new hay, or whose blanket changes at 40 degrees.
- Surprise charges. A holiday surcharge that was never announced becomes an argument on January 1.
None of these require anything fancy to fix. They require deciding early and writing it down.
Step One: Decide What “Open” Means
Before you tell anyone anything, decide for yourself what each holiday looks like. “Closed” in a barn never means nobody is there. Horses still need feeding, water checks, turnout or bring-in, and stall care. What changes is whether clients have access, whether lessons run, and how many staff are on site.
It helps to separate three things that often get lumped together:
- Care: the non-negotiable daily work for every horse on the property.
- Access: whether boarders can come ride, visit, or have the farrier or vet out.
- Programs: whether lessons, camps, clinics, or training rides run.
Once you’ve split those, a lot of decisions get easier. You can keep care at full strength, limit access to certain hours, and pause programs, all on the same day.
A quick comparison of common holiday models
| Model | What it looks like | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full service, reduced hours | Normal care, limited ride or visit windows, no lessons | Full-care boarding barns | Boarders pushing for exceptions to the windows |
| Care only, restricted access | Staff do chores; no boarder access or deliveries for the day | Smaller teams who need a real day off | Needs very clear advance notice |
| Open as usual, premium rate | Normal access with a posted holiday fee | Barns with enough staff to cover | The fee must be announced in advance and in writing |
| Self-care rotation | Boarders in a self-care or partial-care barn sign up for chore shifts | Partial and self-care facilities | Coverage gaps if nobody tracks who signed up |
None of these is the “right” answer. What matters is that you choose one on purpose and that your boarders hear about it early.
Step Two: Protect the Horses From Routine Changes
Here’s the part that’s easy to underestimate. Holidays are when your routine is most likely to change, and horses are creatures of routine. Different people feed at different times. A substitute grabs the wrong scoop or a different hay. A boarder who’s traveling asks a friend to “just throw them some hay.”
That matters because changes in feed are one of the better-documented risk factors for colic. A 1999 study led by researchers at Texas A&M, published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, compared 2,060 horses seen by veterinarians in Texas for colic and for other emergencies. It found that recent changes in diet, and in particular changes in the type of hay, were associated with a higher risk of colic (PubMed abstract). It was an association study, not proof that any single change causes colic, but the practical lesson is simple: the fewer surprises on a holiday morning, the better.
So the goal for any holiday coverage is “same as always, whoever is doing it.” That takes written, specific instructions for every horse:
- What each horse eats, how much, and at what times
- Supplements and medications, and who is allowed to give them
- Blanketing, turnout, and bring-in instructions
- Vet and farrier contacts, and who has authority to approve treatment
- Owner emergency contacts, especially for boarders who are traveling
If those details live in a binder, a whiteboard, or one person’s head, the holiday is when you find out how fragile that is. If they live in a shared place where any authorized caretaker can pull them up, a substitute can follow the same plan the regular team does. That’s one of the practical reasons barns move feed charts and care records into software like Stables Systems, which keeps feed charts, farrier schedules, and vet history together so a fill-in isn’t guessing.
Step Three: Announce the Plan Early, in Writing, Once
A holiday announcement works best when it’s boring. Send it early, send it to everyone at once, and put every important detail in the same message. Cover:
- Dates and hours for each holiday: Thanksgiving (Thursday, November 26), Christmas (Friday, December 25), and New Year’s Day (Friday, January 1)
- What’s different: access, lessons, deliveries, farrier and vet visits
- Any holiday fees, if you charge them, and how they’ll appear on the invoice
- The deadline to submit travel plans, special feed instructions, or requests
- Who to contact in an emergency, and how
Then stop answering the same question by text twenty times. Point people back to the message. If you have a client communication tool that lets you email all boarders or all lesson families at once, this is a good use for it: one message, one source of truth, and a record of what you said. Stables Systems includes mass communications for exactly that kind of announcement, so the plan reaches every client without you retyping it.
Step Four: Handle the Money Part Without Awkwardness
If you plan to charge for holiday care, the policy matters more than the amount. Surprises are what cause arguments. A few principles help:
- Put it in your boarding agreement or policies so it isn’t a one-off.
- Announce it in the same message as the schedule, well before the holiday.
- Be consistent. If you waive it for one client, you’ve set a precedent.
- Handle lesson credits clearly. If you cancel holiday lessons, say up front whether they’re made up, credited, or simply skipped under your package terms.
The lesson side is where barns get tangled most. A family on a monthly package or a prepaid bundle wants to know whether the lesson that falls on Christmas Eve disappears or moves. Decide the rule once, and apply it everywhere. If your billing system tracks lesson packages and automates invoices, you can adjust the schedule once instead of fixing individual accounts one by one in January.
Step Five: Give Your Team a Schedule They Can Count On
The people doing the work deserve the same clarity as your clients. Post holiday staffing as early as you can, ideally a month ahead, and make the shifts specific: who does morning feed, who does evening feed, who is the backup, and who is on call if a horse is sick. If you rotate holidays so no one person always gets stuck with Christmas, say so up front. It builds goodwill more than almost any other small gesture.
Daily task tracking helps here too. When each chore has a name and a checkbox, you can see at a glance that every stall was done and every horse was fed, even if you aren’t at the barn. That’s a real relief when you’re finally sitting at a family dinner.
A Simple Holiday Planning Timeline
- Early November: Decide your model for each holiday, confirm staff availability, and update your feed and care sheets.
- Mid-November: Send the holiday announcement to all clients, with a deadline for travel plans and special instructions.
- Before Thanksgiving: Confirm the vet and farrier schedule, and confirm emergency contacts for traveling owners.
- Mid-December: Send a short reminder with the Christmas and New Year’s details.
- Early January: Invoice holiday charges as announced, then note what worked and what didn’t while it’s fresh.
Make This the Last Year You Improvise
The barns that handle the holidays calmly aren’t luckier or better staffed. They simply decided early, wrote it down, and told everyone once. The horses get the same care, the team gets a real day off, and you stop being the human help desk for every holiday question.
If you’d like help keeping feed charts, schedules, billing, and client messages in one place, take a look at what Stables Systems can do for your barn. It’s built by horse people, so your holiday plan can finally live somewhere more reliable than a text thread.