The short answer
A Christmas closure phone message needs its own dated schedule, not the regular after-hours greeting left running for two weeks, with a clear reopening date, an urgent-call option and an automatic end. Set it up in November, test it in early December, and decide who covers urgent calls before anyone leaves.
On this page
Every December the same thing happens in thousands of offices. Someone on the last working day remembers the phones at the last minute, records a quick christmas closure phone message on the way out the door, and hopes somebody remembers to change it back in January. Some years nobody does, and callers in late January still hear that the office is closed for Christmas.
A closure message, and the call handling behind it, is worth ten minutes of planning in November instead of a scramble on 23 December. This post covers what the message should say, who should be covering urgent calls, and how to set the system up so the closure starts and ends on its own.
How is a Christmas closure different from after hours?
A closure is a planned block of whole days, set up in advance, with a greeting of its own. After hours is the same routine every night. Treating the break as “after hours for two weeks” is how a business ends up with the wrong greeting playing for a fortnight and nobody covering the calls that actually matter.
The nightly and weekend routine, including how to build a sensible out-of-hours flow, is covered in our guide to after-hours routing. A Christmas closure sits on top of that routine and differs from it in three ways.
| After hours | Christmas closure | |
|---|---|---|
| Timing | Every evening and weekend | One block of dates, once a year |
| Message | “We are closed, we open at 8.30” | “We are closed until a specific date” |
| Urgent calls | The usual on-call arrangement | Often a special roster, because regular staff are on leave |
Which public holidays fall over the 2026 Christmas and New Year period?
Christmas Day 2026 falls on a Friday and Boxing Day on a Saturday, so every state and territory adds a public holiday on Monday 28 December. New Year’s Day 2027 falls on a Friday. Check your own state for the detail, because a few things differ.
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s public holiday list shows Christmas Day on Friday 25 December 2026 and an additional public holiday on Monday 28 December in every state and territory, to make up for Boxing Day landing on a Saturday. Tasmania is the exception in form only: it observes Boxing Day itself on the Monday rather than adding a separate day. The same source, read for 2027, confirms New Year’s Day falls on Friday 1 January 2027, which NSW Government corroborates for New South Wales specifically.
Two further things catch businesses that trade into the evening:
If the business runs sites in more than one state, set the holiday layer per site. A Brisbane office and an Adelaide office do not share the same evening holidays.
What should a Christmas closure phone message say?
It should say four things, in this order, in under 30 seconds: that you are closed, the exact date you reopen, what to do if it is urgent, and where else a caller can reach you. Anything longer is time spent waiting for the one part the caller actually needs.
A simple structure to adapt:
> “Thanks for calling [business name]. Our office is closed for the Christmas break and reopens on [day and date]. If your call is urgent, [press 1 / call this number / what to do]. For anything else, leave a message or email us at [address] and we will get back to you when we reopen. Merry Christmas.”
What makes it work:
Who covers urgent calls over the break?
Decide that before anyone leaves, and put it into the phone system rather than a spreadsheet. The roster is the part most businesses skip, and it is the part customers notice.
Work through three questions:
Many businesses also need to settle staff leave before the roster can be built. Whether an employer can require staff to take annual leave over a shutdown depends on the relevant award or enterprise agreement; for employees not covered by either, the Fair Work Ombudsman says an employer can require paid annual leave over a temporary Christmas and New Year shutdown where the requirement is reasonable. Settle the leave first, because the on-call roster depends on who is actually around.
How do you set up a closure that switches itself on and off?
Set it as a dated schedule, not a manual switch someone has to remember. Most business phone systems let you add a closure period with a start and end date and time, and route calls to a different greeting and menu only inside that window.
A clean setup looks like this:
If callers will hear a menu, keep it to one option. The principles behind a menu people can actually use are in our guide to auto attendant design.
Messages left during the closure
A voicemail box nobody opens until the middle of January is a stack of enquiries gone cold, and messages keep arriving the whole time the office is shut. The real question is not whether they come in, but who sees them first.
Sending voicemail to email puts every message, recording attached, straight into an inbox the on-call person can scan once a day without logging into anything separate. Anything genuinely urgent that was left as a message still gets noticed, rather than waiting behind the rest of the mailbox.
On the first morning back, clear that inbox before anything else. Every caller who left a message over the break is still waiting on the promise the greeting made them.
Testing it before the office closes
Test in early December, not on the last afternoon. Set a short temporary test window, call the main number from a mobile, and listen through the whole path: the greeting, the urgent option, the on-call mobile actually ringing, and a test message landing in the inbox. Then remove the test window, so the real closure schedule is the only one left running.
If anything in that path turns out to be wrong, early December leaves weeks to fix it rather than minutes. A business that only finds the gap on 24 December is stuck with it for the whole break.
If the busiest stretch of the year happens to land right before the closure, it is also worth having calls answered for the hours nobody can get to the phone at all. NexGen has been setting up business phone systems for 17 years, with 7,500+ businesses served and Australian-based support, and standard onboarding is 7 business days, so there is still time to act before Christmas. To see what answering calls while the office is closed can look like, start with the AI receptionist.
A Christmas closure phone message checklist
Work through this in November, while there is still time to fix anything that does not work.
Keep calls answered while the office is closed
An AI receptionist can take a message, answer common questions and flag anything urgent, even outside the hours anyone is rostered on.