Christmas is a time to really go through all your favourite recipes and choose carefully what you are going to buy, prepare and cook for the best people in the world – your family.

At the same time it good to think about the music and the drinks. In Australia as it is quite hot and dry at Christmas, so this means all types of drinks – alcoholic and otherwise.

Are you thinking of a themed Christmas? I don’t normally unless it is colour related i.e. an all white, silver or a red & green Christmas. However within the themed arena there are some families who e.g. choose to have an English type Christmas with pretend snow, and all that goes with this. They also enjoy a hot roasted meal with the various meats and accompanying vegetables; fact is they wouldn’t have any other way.

To my mind this is a little cruel towards the cook – very hot work in a very hot climate. I believe that it is better to enjoy this as a "Christmas in July Dinner" when it truly is winter in our hemisphere.

My way of preparing for Christmas is to serve a mix of hot and cold foods – beautiful big fat prawns on a bed of ice with a lime mayonnaise, hot meats, gravy, and hot potato dishes with lots of different and delicious salads. Particularly those tried and true special occasion salads which one associates with the Aussi climate; and, as I adore the sharp/sweet taste and colour of raspberries they tend to feature quite heavily on our Menu.

And of course no Christmas meal is complete without dessert/s. For us it is a Christmas bombe, Tipsy Laird’s cake and a fresh fruit salad. If I make a plum pudding I will also serve this with brandy custard and thick clotted cream. I will include a number of sauces that can be prepared in advance to accompany the desserts.

This is not a meal for the faint hearted but the beauty of it is that a fair percentage of it can be prepared in advance. And it goes without saying that the family really enjoys the feast – because undoubtedly this is what it is.

Another thing I tend to do well in advance – other than checking out all my cook books and writing copious lists and placing orders etc. well before the day – is to buy the latest family magazines for example; Delicious, Better Homes and Gardens, Vogue Entertaining etc. My reasoning is that there is always something new to try or do and this new delight may very well be next year’s family favourite.

You may want to think about developing your *Your Own Holiday Food Traditions*. Every holiday season, many of us look forward to eating special treats made using long-held and cherished family recipes. Many families have holiday food traditions they hold dear. There are those who cannot imagine a holiday without Grandma’s date biscuits or Great Uncle Peter’s lemon stuffing. Year after year, we enjoy these treats and use them as a way to stay connected with our families and personal histories.

More than mere sustenance, these traditional foods we enjoy are often a source of family pride and lead to conversations about long gone family members and the fond memories of past occasions. Family food traditions can become one of the most important parts of the holiday season for many people. There was once however, a time in each and every family history before those recipes existed. Grandma had to make those brandy minced pies for the first time. When she did, she may have placed them right next to the White Christmas sweets made using her Great Grandma’s secret recipe, having no idea they were destined to become such an integral part of her family traditions. Maybe Great Uncle Peter’s lemon stuffing only came about because Great Aunt Beth was sick years ago and he had to come up with some way to stuff a bird himself on Christmas morning. His reliance on a simple recipe card with the chucking in of a few extras that happened to be lying around the kitchen, could well have started this family tradition also.

Grandma and Great Uncle Peter didn’t intend to create a generational tradition. They simply hoped that they could add a little something extra to the Christmas meal by doing something a little different, they experimented and were overjoyed by the outcome. The creators of these original dishes may have never intended to make them again. They just happened to feel like doing something different or adding something new to the Christmas table. So these festive food traditions then become special to many of us, and while it is wonderful to experience those comforting recipes as each holiday rocks around, it is also a great idea to remember how those traditions began. And more importantly to realise that we can also create our own traditions.

So this holiday season maybe you can consider doing something new. Think about adding a different plate to the dinner or dessert table. Make a side dish not generally found on your table or produce a biscuit or a cake that you have not tried before. Try out some new ideas and see what happens. Some of the new ideas and offerings may not be likd. Others may be enjoyed, but not to the same extent as your family’s holiday traditionals. One new dish might just the raver you are looking for so that it stays forever on your festive menu. Over time, that simple decision to experiment may turn into part of your family’s traditional holiday table. The new and unusual salad recipe you find this year may eventually become a staple item that even your great-grandchildren cannot imagine missing.

Family Traditions form part of the essence of one’s family. So while there is no precise formula to inventing a new holiday tradition, it is not difficult. One cannot really intentionally "design" a new food tradition as they tend to be based on personal taste, to evolve over time. So on this basis you may as well go the whole hog and create something flamboyuant and really add something deliciously new to the family feast.

And of course you need to choose the music and to think about those quick and easy but luscious little bites to eat when you entertain your friends during the lead up to the day, plus a number of dear little somethings from the grape to sip as you chat while listening to your Carol of choice,smoky jazz, some early Latin plain chant or your soul lifting classical orchestral piece!

Talking of traditions do you need the words to your favourite Christmas Carols to take along to Carols by Candlelight. Be a good scout- be prepared . So easy if you don’t have to queue up – just grab your prime position already armed with the words!

And as Christmas is really all about the children you could implement some good pre-Christmas ideas for them! Besides them getting involved with their usual technological products they would probably also enjoy hearing the traditional and the modern Christmas Tales *the reason for the season* and also watching and listening to videos/cds with their lovely heart warming stories. For the little ones an Advent calendar really builds up the excitement.

Children could enjoy Christmas Stories written from the Imagined Perspective of Mary, Joseph, also others at the Nativity. Or you could get them a script so that they could perform a Nativity play for their parents and friends – We used to do this as children, I remember trying to build a stage with my brothers which hopefully wouldn't fall over when we were all doing our bit on it. Getting robed into the ubiquitous sheet and dragging it through the dirt when we became a shepherd or an angel or even Mary or Joseph. My doll was often the baby in the crib or my little sister or even the family cat was roped in. There were lots of rehearsels and it was fun - what more can I say and we really felt like Christmas had arrived.

You could I think, obtain scripts that come with Christmas Carol Sheet Music, Rehearsal, Production Notes,etc. And what about those really old traditional Christmas stories that you probably read as a child yourself; such authors as Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Anderson. I bought on ebay last year a (out of copyright) big book of traditional Christmas Tales that I re-organised, re-punctuated and generally tidied up which I will link hub by hub so that you can print them out and read them to your children.

If you would like to give the children in your life a thrill; what about organizing a letter from Santa’s home at the North Pole where the elves and fairies help out at Santa’s Workshop by sending "Personalized Letters From Santa. Every child loves a personalized letter from Santa Claus, and even more so when postmarked from the "North Pole". Google "Santa Letters" and you should be able to easily find one of the many links available to arrange a letter from Santa to your child.

What about our animals who hold dear to our collective hearts! Particularly at Christmas - after all why should they miss out on all the fun?

We only have two fur kids now, our dear boy who is a large black Labrador - Humphrey, and our bossy madam a small Jack Russell X Miniature Fox Terrier, known as Harriett. But one Christmas a number of years ago when we had Humphrey, who was a young chap then, Polly our old girl (tibetan terrierXcavalier King Charles mix - aged 14 when she went to God) and Gus the Burmese was two, I thought that I would give them all a special treat for their Christmas breakfast. Bearing in mind that our animals have always been fed a diet of dry biscuits and fresh bones for teeth with a couple of either chicken wings or necks thrown in a few times a week, this was a real break out for them.

So off I went and bought them all a can of a gourmet nature; I tied their gifts up in red bows and put them under the tree - all carefully chosen both special and appropriate to their breed and age. No names so no pack drill! I am sure you can imagine how distressed I was when one by one they all vomited up their very *special* treat on Christmas morning and on the carpet – never again – obviously not one of my better ideas! This canned fare was much too rich for our plain diet animals. Some great gift that was!

ZERO TO COUNTDOWN!!!

………and now down to the my countdown to the celebration of Christmas obviously your countdown would be slightly different to mine.

At the beginning of the Christmas period we celebrate my older son’s birthday so I actually do not feel up to the Christmas rush until the 6th December has passed. If I can get the Xmas tree up before this date I feel I am doing very nicely.

Now putting up the tree is no mean feat as it involves lots of memories, "oohs" & "aahs" and "do you remember when’s?" Very time consuming but well worth the effort. It is only over the last few years (a hang over from when we lived in the country and couldn’t - for love nor money - get a real tree) that I have resorted to a replica tree – the thought repels but the ease delights me. What more can I say?

I adore the decorations - many given to me by lovely first mother in law who was from South America - some given to me by my sister with the year of the giving inscribed somewhere on the ornament, some are even from when I was a child. There is an old fat snowman which I had when I was about 6 years old. A beautiful china faced angel with feather wings from Argentina. There is also a round glass bauble which is in loving memory of a dear friend. And many, many angels as my husband gives me a different one each year – yes I really do love Christmas and all it entails.

So hopefully by the 7th December the birthday celebrations are over, the Christmas tree is up, and the next step in my personal calendar is the writing of Christmas cards. My way of tackling this job is to keep an updated record of all those gorgeous cards we receive from forever and start at the top of the list.

Luckily for me, this year the little fairy lights are still up in the tree outside and around the canvas gazebo, so that is one less job.

Apart from the shopping for gifts and ordering of food (early December)and the making of cakes and puddings (mid November), the above events are the ones I try to do early so that Christmas is actually alive and kicking in our house. I have to admit though I am not always totally organised– there is always the card that gets posted too late or some item of food I have forgotten to buy – but I do try and in the end we all manage to get there and usually it is great fun.

copyright: a.a.gallagher 2007

for more Christmas hubs go to

http://hubpages.com/hub/HubMob-Weekly-Topic-A-Revolutionary-Christmas-In-Rhythm--Rhyme

http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-Food-Planning-For-The-Big-Day

http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-Day--Your-Food-Plan

http://hubpages.com/hub/Puddings-For-Christmas