
The 2018 holiday season is officially here. For most people, that means it’s time to start thinking about buying presents, planning big meals, scheduling travel, and / or planning party outfits. For insurance nuts like us, that means it’s time for a refresher course on all the ways things can go wrong at your house.
Here, we present a breakdown of the many ways holiday celebrations can bring extra risk into your life – and tips for how to minimize that risk to keep your home and family safe. We’ve also included a holiday home safety checklist at the end, so if your schedule is already jam-packed, feel free to jump right there.
Holiday Cooking Risks & Safety Tips
Thanksgiving is maybe the biggest cooking event of the holiday season, but it’s really just the start of a season of feasting – at parties, on holidays like Christmas and Kwanzaa, at cookie exchanges, etc.
That’s good news for hungry revelers, but it also increases the risk of fires. In fact, cooking is the leading cause of home fires in the United States, sparking 172,100 fires per year – nearly half of all fires that start in houses. Maybe not surprisingly, cooking-related fires spike on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.
And here’s a sobering statistic: while home fire deaths overall have fallen significantly since 1980, cooking fire deaths have stayed constant, suggesting that improvements in education and technology haven’t affected the risks of cooking.