The Australian Christmas Guide

Anything shelf stable can be bought from late September: biscuits, shortbread, crackers, chutneys, mustards, chocolate, nuts, bon bons and hampers. Early buying is not only about avoiding the rush. Christmas ranges are produced once for the season and are not restocked once they sell through. Fresh food is the opposite, and seafood, leaves, dairy and fruit belong to the last 48 hours. Our Christmas range goes up in October.

A cold glazed leg ham is the centrepiece in most homes, served with prawns or other seafood, two or three salads, and a board of cheese, crackers and condiments beforehand. Dessert is usually pavlova, trifle or cold pudding, with cherries and mangoes on the table. Roast turkey still appears in the cooler states and in households keeping an English Christmas.

Allow 200g to 250g of ham per person on the bone, which makes a half leg of about 5kg right with leftovers. Add 250g of prawns per person as part of a spread, 40g of cheese per person before the meal, one 100g pack of crackers per three or four people, three salads and two desserts.

Allow 60g a person when the board follows a full lunch, and 100g when the board is the meal. For ten people after lunch that is 600g in total, best split across three cheeses of about 200g each: something hard, something soft, something blue. Add a fourth cheese over twelve people, and take it all out of the fridge an hour before serving.

Keep the centrepiece and cut around it. Buy one ham or one tray of prawns rather than both, hold the cheese at three pieces, and take the saving out of the accompaniments: plain crackers for volume, one type of nut, one jar rather than four. Buy that pantry half in October while nothing is urgent, and serve the meal cold so the oven stays off. Then ask two guests to bring a salad and one to bring dessert.

Ring your fishmonger in the last week of November and ask when the order book opens and closes. Most close about a week out, and the larger grades are spoken for before that. Name a collection day and an hour when you order, then confirm in mid December. We do not sell fresh seafood, so book this one locally while the shelf stable half of the list waits in a cupboard.

Most of the table, if it is built that way. Roast potatoes cooked in olive oil, roast vegetables, bread, olives, relish, salads, and one hot dish with structure such as a whole roasted cauliflower. The three things to check are the fat the potatoes are roasted in, the butter in the vegetables, and the gelatine in the sweets.

Cold food, mostly, and rarely at the dining table. Ham sandwiches with relish, prawns, the remains of the cheese board, cold chicken and whatever pudding survived, grazed across the cricket or a beach. The most useful things in the fridge are the ones needing no cooking and no cutlery. Crackers, nuts and jars sit in festive entertaining.