Christmas on my mind - a serendipitous lucky dip

"If you're not a list maker, get ready, you are about to become one." Christmas Cooking with the Weekly

Christmas is suddenly almost upon us. Our's is further complicated by our wedding anniversary three days before and our grandson's birthday two days after. That was a worrying Christmas - wondering whether his mother would be whisked off to hospital during our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve - he was due on Christmas Eve.

Anyway Christmas is on my mind. Firstly with respect to presents - a prospect I always find completely daunting. Even the children are getting more difficult to buy for as they grow, and secondly with respect to the grand family Christmas Eve dinner. We long ago decided to have the turkey dinner on Christmas Eve evening - it was one thing less to worry about on Christmas day and the remains of the turkey provided admirably light food for lunch. This year there are potentially 18 of us as our extended family expands. So maybe I should be making those lists.

Nevertheless I was not going to write about Christmas yet, and decided to go for the lucky dip - I have been feeling very, very lazy of late. I do have a very long list of potentially interesting topics but you sort of have to be in the mood. Maybe I should do a lucky dip with my list.

Anyway my chosen book was Christmas Cooking with the Weekly which was a Christmas gift a few years back. So it was serendipitous because Christmas has been very much on my mind. And it's a beautiful book although I confess I have not made much from it. I do look at it every year though for ideas of how to decorate the table, and what gifts I could make - for it includes these things in its nine menus. The book is organised around these nine menus which, although they include a Classic Christmas Eve, are very Australian focussed - picnics, barbecues, Asian, Italian, brunch ...

I have taken a very long time to adapt to the notion of Christmas at the beginning of summer, rather than in the depths of winter. When you come to Australia you realise what a very northern hemisphere religion Christianity is. I mean Easter in Autumn doesn't make much sense either. For the big festivals are really based on older pagan festivals that celebrated the turning points of the year - the solstices and the equinoxes. Hence Christmas is joyful because it is celebrating the winter solstice and the turning to the light, Really it should be on December 21st. As for Santa Claus and his sleigh - it really doesn't make sense here.

I think our first Christmas in Australia was spent camping and driving up to Sydney with some friends. We may even have had our Christmas day on the beach. Which is what a lot of Australians do. And indeed the page I opened my lucky dip book at, is part of the section on a picnic on a beach, and so it features a lot of seafood. And I suspect that a true Australian Christmas would be more about expensive seafood - prawns, lobster, crayfish, and oysters than turkey - although we do all do the turkey. It is often served cold though and given our climate this makes a lot of sense. You've still got to cook it though - and last year I was cooking it on a day that I think reached 39 degrees! But now I also make a nod to the seafood tradition by doing gravlax for the first course - and hoping that somebody else will provide the prawns.

And whilst we are still on Australia you also can't really get any more Australian than the Australian Women's Weekly. I don't think I ever bought it - I certainly don't now, but I do have a few of their cookery books because these are very good. As a teenager I read women's magazines pretty avidly but I'm not interested now. I don't even get delicious anymore.

So that's my book - more than a cookery book in this case because of the table decorations, the menu planning and the edible gifts. And it is all lavishly and beautifully illustrated. Full of beautiful young people eating and drinking in mod Oz style. A not very realistic picnic but I guess something we could dream about. And really not that difficult to do.

My Christmas won't be nearly as beautiful, but if I start making those lists it might be just as enjoyable. They did have a useful tip somewhere though - make a special drink for the poor people who are the designated drivers of the day. And they provide some ideas, so I might follow up on that. After all we have children too.

I'll deal with the recipeI picked tomorrow.