Ballot organisers face a battle over venue space with organisers of pantomimes, nativity plays and festive parties if they are to arrange what would be the closest general election to Christmas since the first one-day vote was held more than a century ago.

The prime minister, Boris Johnson, has named 12 December as his preferred date for an election. Should MPs grant his wish, it would be the first December general election since 1923, and the closest to Christmas since 1918.

The Association of Electoral Administrators warned last week that uncertainty over the date of a proposed election was hiking up costs as organisers found their venues of choice had been booked for pre-Christmas events.

“Availability is an issue. If there is very short notice, for example, it might be an issue if a hall is being used by an amateur dramatic society,” said Laura Lock, the association’s deputy chief executive said at the time.

“But the bigger issue we are finding is with count centres. We know of at least one case where both their first and second choices have been both booked for Christmas parties. They couldn’t let them in without cancelling the Christmas events. In the case of a sports centre doing that, for example, we can only pay the normal rental. We can’t pay them for the loss of income.”

The association had warned that a possible knock-on effect might be the necessity to use smaller venues, which could mean later declarations because staff have less room in which to carry out counts.

On Thursday, it said those same difficulties would also arise with the new date. A spokeswoman welcomed the “certainty over an election date at the earliest opportunity”, but said 12 December would “still present challenges”.

December elections are unusual in the UK, with only six having been held in that month. Prior to the end of the first world war, general elections were multi-day affairs and four were held wholly or partially in the last month of the year between 1832 and 1918.

That latter year saw another in December – the closest, in fact, to Christmas – followed by the most recent, on Thursday 6 December 1923. The prime minister on that occasion was the Conservative, Stanley Baldwin.

Like Boris Johnson, Baldwin had been in office only a matter of months when he decided to call an election. But, unlike Johnson, he had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.

Baldwin’s decision to go to the polls was for personal as well as political reasons. He had become convinced of the need to introduce tariffs, in order to protect British industry against foreign competition. However, his government had pledged not to introduce tariffs.

Baldwin saw it as only proper to ask the country to endorse his change of mind, and as such called a snap general election. But his gamble backfired and, when the country voted, the result was a hung parliament and ultimately a Labour minority government.

A general election on 12 December 2019 would mean a dissolution of parliament on 7 November. If MPs fail to trigger an election by that date, however, polling day would almost certainly slip into early next year.

A delay of even a few days would push polling day into the week immediately before Christmas; a scenario politicians would probably be keen to avoid.

Instead, MPs could hold the trigger-vote in their first week back in the new year, with dissolution potentially on 9 January 2020 and a general election on 13 February, though this could create a further dilemma, as the election campaign might coincide with the UK’s possible exit from the EU on 31 January.