Getting the Kitchen Ready for Christmas: A Practical Guide to a Calm Christmas Kitchen

Getting the kitchen ready for Christmas is not about creating a perfect kitchen. It is about making enough practical space, in the fridge, freezer, cupboards and days ahead, for the extra food, cooking, people and ordinary family life that Christmas brings.

There is a particular point in the run-up to Christmas when the kitchen begins to change. A tin of chocolates appears on top of a cupboard. There are extra bags of flour and sugar in the press. Someone brings home something that needs to be kept “for Christmas”, which immediately creates the question of where exactly it is going to live until then. The freezer starts filling up, baking ingredients multiply and suddenly the fridge that seemed perfectly adequate all year is expected to accommodate Christmas dinner, desserts, drinks, leftovers and several things nobody is allowed to eat yet.

All of this happens while the kitchen is still doing its ordinary job. Breakfast has to be made. School lunches continue. There are weekday dinners, cups of tea, dishwasher loads, pets to feed and people wandering in asking what there is to eat. The kitchen does not close for three weeks so that we can prepare it beautifully for Christmas.

That is why I think getting the kitchen ready for Christmas is much less about making it immaculate and much more about helping it work through a particularly busy few weeks. A little thought beforehand can make an enormous difference later: knowing what is already in the freezer, having somewhere to put the Christmas food when it arrives, checking the roasting tin before Christmas morning and working out roughly how several dishes are going to share one oven.

None of this is especially glamorous. It is, however, the kind of preparation that can make Christmas in a real family kitchen considerably easier.

In this guide, we’ll work through the Christmas kitchen from the beginning: checking what you already have, making space, planning meals, organising the Christmas food shop, deciding what is worth preparing ahead, thinking about baking and the table, getting Christmas Eve organised and finally working out a Christmas Day cooking plan that does not require you to perform oven arithmetic while everyone else is opening presents.

And somewhere along the way, I hope we leave enough room for the kitchen to remain what it always was: one of the places where ordinary family life happens.

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Your Free Christmas Kitchen Companion

I have created a free Christmas Kitchen Companion to use alongside this guide. It is a collection of practical printable pages designed to help with the parts of Christmas kitchen preparation that are much easier when they are written down rather than carried around in your head.

The collection includes a Christmas Kitchen Essentials page, Christmas Meal Planner, Christmas Food Shopping List, Christmas Kitchen Prep Timeline, Christmas Menu Planner, Christmas Oven & Cooking Schedule, Christmas Kitchen To-Do List, Favourite Christmas Recipes and Christmas Kitchen Notes.

You can print the entire collection and keep it together in a Christmas or seasonal binder, or simply choose the pages that are useful for the Christmas you are actually having. If you are not hosting Christmas dinner this year, you probably do not need an oven schedule. If you are feeding a houseful, however, that may turn out to be the page you are most grateful for on Christmas morning.

As with all of my Christmas printables, the idea is not to create more work. They are there to hold the information that otherwise has a habit of disappearing just when you need it.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE CHRISTMAS KITCHEN COMPANION

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1. Start With the Kitchen You Actually Have

Before making a Christmas menu or buying a single extra packet of anything, it is worth simply looking at the kitchen you already have.

Not the kitchen you might have if you reorganised every cupboard, bought new storage and finally dealt with that drawer everybody has been avoiding. The kitchen that is actually going to carry your household through December.

What would make it work a little better?

Perhaps one worktop has gradually become a landing place for post, school things and everything nobody knows where else to put. Perhaps the freezer is so full that adding Christmas food would require advanced engineering. Maybe the roasting tin has seen better days, or you know people are staying and will need more room around the table.

This is where the Christmas Kitchen To-Do List from the Kitchen Companion is useful.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS KITCHEN TO-DO LIST

I would keep this list deliberately short. This is not the moment to discover an urgent need to reorganise the entire pantry. Instead, concentrate on the handful of jobs that will genuinely make the kitchen easier to use during Christmas.

That might include:

• clearing a useful stretch of worktop;
• checking the fridge and freezer;
• making one cupboard or shelf available for Christmas food;
• finding the roasting tin and baking trays;
• checking serving dishes and utensils;
• locating table linens if you use them;
• making sure anything you know you will need is clean and accessible;
• dealing with something broken or missing that will genuinely cause a problem.

There may be other jobs particular to your own kitchen, but they should earn their place on the list. Christmas kitchen preparation is not Christmas kitchen renovation. If a cupboard has been mildly annoying you since March, there is every chance it can continue doing so until January.

The aim is simply to remove a few practical obstacles before the kitchen becomes busier.

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2. Check What You Already Have Before Buying Anything

Christmas has a way of making us buy duplicates. We see baking ingredients in the supermarket and cannot remember whether there is cinnamon at home. We buy foil because Christmas clearly requires foil, only to discover three unopened rolls in the cupboard. We pick up another packet of icing sugar while the previous two quietly wait behind the flour.

Before the main Christmas shopping begins, a quick stocktake can save money, space and several mildly irritating discoveries.

The Christmas Kitchen Essentials page gives you somewhere to keep track of the basics.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS KITCHEN ESSENTIALS

Start with the things you use for ordinary cooking and baking. Check flour, sugars, spices, raising agents, vanilla, dried fruit, chocolate and anything else that appears regularly in your Christmas recipes. If you bake only one particular thing every Christmas, check that recipe now rather than assuming you will remember its ingredients three weeks later.

Then think about the less exciting supplies that become surprisingly important when the kitchen is busy: baking paper, foil, freezer bags or storage containers, kitchen roll, bin bags, washing-up liquid and dishwasher tablets. Nobody puts dishwasher tablets on a beautiful Christmas mood board, but running out of them after feeding twelve people has a way of bringing them sharply into focus.

It is worth checking equipment too. Find the roasting tin. Make sure the baking trays still fit the oven. Check the kitchen scales if you use them, and think about the serving dishes, utensils and cookware that will be needed for the meals you are actually planning.

You do not need a prescribed list of “Christmas kitchen essentials”. One family may need a huge roasting dish and three serving platters; another may be spending Christmas Day elsewhere and need very little at all. The useful question is simply whether there is anything you are genuinely going to need that would be easier to sort now.

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3. My Christmas Kitchen Favourites

Most of us do not need a kitchen full of new equipment for Christmas, and I certainly would not suggest buying things simply because December has arrived. Much of what we need is probably already sitting in our cupboards and drawers.

There are, however, a handful of reliable kitchen pieces that earn their keep year after year, particularly when the kitchen gets busier. A good casserole or roasting dish, sturdy baking trays, a large mixing bowl, accurate kitchen scales, useful food-storage containers and decent oven gloves are not particularly glamorous Christmas purchases, but they are the things I find myself reaching for again and again.

I have gathered some of my favourite practical kitchen pieces together, along with useful alternatives if there is something you genuinely need to replace or add before Christmas.

A Few Things I Find Genuinely Useful:

SHOP MY CHRISTMAS KITCHEN FAVOURITES

Affiliate links: If you purchase through one of my links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

If what you already have works perfectly well, keep using it. The point of checking the kitchen is to discover what you need, not to create a reason to buy something.

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4. Make Space Before the Christmas Food Arrives

One of the most useful things you can create in a Christmas kitchen costs absolutely nothing: empty space.

Before adding Christmas food, take a realistic look at the fridge, freezer and cupboards. This does not need to become an elaborate clear-out. We are simply trying to make room for what is coming.

The freezer is a particularly good place to start. Most of us have things in there that could usefully become dinner over the next couple of weeks. There may be portions of soup, leftovers, bread, meat or forgotten meals that can be used rather than continuing to occupy valuable space.

I actually think an emptier freezer can be more useful before Christmas than a beautifully stocked one. It gives you somewhere to put things you prepare ahead, extra bread, desserts, unexpected leftovers and anything that suddenly needs freezing.

The fridge deserves the same treatment. Use open jars and ingredients where sensible, clear out anything genuinely past its best and consider whether things currently being refrigerated actually need to be there. As Christmas gets closer, it can also help to designate a particular shelf or section for food that belongs to Christmas meals.

Cupboards do not need to be immaculate either. A little space for Christmas baking ingredients, snacks and the bits and pieces that begin arriving through December is enough.

And clear some worktop if you can. Not every surface, and certainly not to create the impression that nobody lives there. Just enough room to put down a mixing bowl, unpack shopping or make dinner without first having to relocate seventeen unrelated objects.

Space gives the kitchen somewhere to absorb Christmas.

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5. Work Out Who You Are Actually Feeding

Before deciding what to cook, establish who will actually be eating and when.

This sounds almost too obvious to mention, but Christmas food planning can very quickly begin with menus rather than people. We think about turkey and desserts and cheese before working out which meals we are hosting and how many people will actually be sitting around the table.

The Christmas Meal Planner is useful here.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS MEAL PLANNER

Think beyond Christmas dinner. Will you need Christmas Eve dinner? Does your family make something particular for Christmas breakfast? Will people want food later on Christmas night? Are you hosting on St Stephen’s Day? Will visitors be coming at another point during the week?

Then think about the ordinary days surrounding those meals. People still need dinner on December 21st. And the 22nd. And the 23rd. Those dinners do not need to become festive events. In fact, this can be an excellent time for deliberately easy food: soup and bread, pasta, something from the freezer, a slow-cooker dinner or whatever your household will happily eat without creating another substantial kitchen project.

Planning those ordinary meals can sometimes be more useful than planning another elaborate Christmas dish because it protects time and energy for the cooking you actually care about.

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6. Decide What Christmas Dinner Actually Is

Once we know who we are feeding, we can decide what we are feeding them.

The Christmas Menu Planner gives the whole meal somewhere to live.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS MENU PLANNER

Write down everything you genuinely intend to serve rather than simply writing “Christmas dinner”. If you are having a starter, include it. Add the main dish, potatoes, vegetables, stuffing, sauces, dessert, drinks and anything else that belongs to Christmas dinner in your house.

This is also a useful opportunity to ask whether every traditional item still deserves its place.

Family food traditions can be wonderful precisely because they are repeated. There may be a particular stuffing, dessert or side dish that instantly makes Christmas dinner feel like Christmas in your family. Those are worth protecting.

But occasionally we discover that we have spent years preparing something nobody particularly likes because at some point it became attached to our idea of a proper Christmas dinner.

If everybody loves sprouts, make the sprouts.

If six people politely move them around their plates every year, perhaps the sprouts have served their time.

The menu should reflect the people around your table, not an imaginary Christmas dinner against which yours is being judged.

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7. Turn the Menu Into One Proper Christmas Food Shopping Plan

Once the meals and menus are decided, the Christmas food shop becomes much easier because the list is being generated by what you are actually going to cook.

The Christmas Food Shopping List is designed for exactly this stage.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS FOOD SHOPPING LIST

Before adding anything to the list, check the kitchen essentials you have already gone through. Then work through each planned meal and recipe so ingredients are less likely to be forgotten.

It can help to think of Christmas shopping in stages. Pantry goods, drinks, baking ingredients and other long-life items can usually be bought well ahead. Some chilled or frozen items may be bought or ordered later. Fresh food can be left until closer to Christmas.

This spreads both the practical work and, if useful for your household, some of the spending.

It also helps to shop according to the number of people you are actually feeding. Supermarkets at Christmas have an extraordinary ability to convince otherwise sensible adults that a family gathering requires enough cheese, crackers and crisps to sustain a small hotel until February.

There is nothing wrong with abundance if that is part of the pleasure of Christmas in your house. I love having lovely food around at Christmas too. The difference is between buying plenty because you genuinely want it and buying enormous quantities because everything in the supermarket is suggesting that Christmas will somehow be inadequate without them.

If you are also working with a Christmas budget, this section fits naturally with the Christmas Budget Planner in my Christmas Planning guide.

READ: HOW TO PLAN CHRISTMAS WITHOUT THE STRESS

A menu, shopping list and budget working together can remove an enormous amount of last-minute decision-making.

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8. Decide What Is Actually Worth Making Ahead

“Get ahead for Christmas” is good advice only when the thing you are doing ahead genuinely makes life easier.

There is no particular virtue in spending half of November preparing things for December if doing so creates more work than simply making them closer to the time.

The Christmas Kitchen Prep Timeline is there to help decide what is worth doing when.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS KITCHEN PREP TIMELINE

Work backwards from the meals you are planning. Some things can sensibly happen several weeks ahead. Others are ideal a few days before Christmas. There may be sauces, stuffing, desserts, baking or vegetable preparation that can be done earlier, depending on what you cook.

The important thing is to consider not just whether something can be made ahead, but whether doing so is useful in your particular kitchen.

Freezer space matters. Time matters. How much you enjoy cooking matters. If you genuinely love a day of Christmas preparation with music playing and something lovely in the oven, that can be part of the season rather than merely a job to eliminate.

Equally, buying something ready-made because it removes a job you dislike is a perfectly sensible form of Christmas preparation.

The timeline is there to distribute the work rather than multiply it.

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9. Let Christmas Baking Be Something You Actually Enjoy

Christmas baking deserves slightly different treatment because, for many of us, it is not simply food preparation. It is part of Christmas itself.

There are recipes we make because we love eating them, recipes we make because somebody in the family would notice immediately if we stopped, and sometimes recipes we make largely because the smell of them in the kitchen feels like December.

If baking is one of the parts of Christmas you love, give it some space rather than squeezing it between seventeen other jobs.

My Christmas Baking Companion & Recipes includes a Christmas Baking Planner, pages for favourite recipes and our Christmas recipe collection, along with recipes including Traditional Mince Pies, Vanilla Butter Cookies, Traditional Irish Christmas Cake and Gingerbread Men.

PRINT: MY CHRISTMAS BAKING PLANNER

EXPLORE THE CHRISTMAS BAKING COMPANION & RECIPES

I also have a complete collection of 15 Great Christmas Baking Ideas if you are looking for inspiration.

READ: 15 GREAT CHRISTMAS BAKING IDEAS

You do not have to bake everything yourself for Christmas to feel homemade. Perhaps there is one cake you always make. Perhaps mince pies are your thing. Maybe there is an afternoon when everyone decorates biscuits, although by the end there is considerably more icing on the kitchen than on the biscuits.

Choose the baking that adds something to your Christmas and buy the rest if that makes more sense.

My Baking Favourites

If you are planning a little Christmas baking, I have also gathered together some of the baking things I use and find useful in my Baking Favourites collection.

Affiliate note: Some of the links in this section are affiliate links. This means I may earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through them, at no additional cost to you. I only share products I genuinely use, like, or believe are a good fit for Our Little House in the Country.

There’s something particularly lovely about baking at Christmas — the familiar recipes we return to each year, afternoons spent making biscuits, and the tins slowly filling up with things to share.

These are a few useful favourites for Christmas baking, with a couple of festive extras that make it all feel a little more special.

Embossed Christmas Rolling Pin
A beautiful wooden rolling pin carved with festive designs such as snowflakes, reindeer and Christmas trees — lovely for making simple Christmas biscuits feel instantly special.

Christmas Cookie Cutter Set
A good set of stainless-steel cutters with classic shapes such as stars, trees, gingerbread people, snowflakes and stockings. One of those things that comes out year after year.

Large Mixing Bowl
A sturdy, generously sized mixing bowl for everything from gingerbread and biscuits to Christmas cakes. I love the traditional stoneware-style bowls that look just as at home sitting on the kitchen dresser.

Digital Kitchen Scales
Not particularly festive, perhaps, but one of the things I use most when baking. Simple, accurate digital scales make such a difference, particularly when you’re making several recipes at once.

Large Baking Trays
Good, heavy baking trays are invaluable during Christmas baking season — especially when there seem to be endless batches of biscuits going in and out of the oven.

Stackable Cooling Racks
One of those wonderfully practical things you don’t realise you need until every available surface in the kitchen is covered in cooling biscuits. Stackable racks are particularly useful when baking in batches.

Cookie Decorating & Icing Set
A simple set of piping bags and decorating nozzles for icing biscuits, gingerbread houses and Christmas cupcakes. Nothing elaborate required — just enough to make decorating easy and enjoyable.

Christmas Biscuit Tins
Pretty reusable tins for storing homemade biscuits, gingerbread and other Christmas treats. They’re also a lovely way to turn a batch of baking into a simple homemade gift.

Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase through them, at no additional cost to you. I only share things I genuinely think are useful or a good fit for life here at Our Little House in the Country.

Affiliate links: If you purchase through one of my links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The best Christmas baking plan is not necessarily the one with the longest list. It is the one that leaves enough time to enjoy at least some of what you are making.

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10. Give the Christmas Food Somewhere to Live

As Christmas shopping starts arriving, a little organisation becomes surprisingly useful.

This does not require a row of labelled baskets or a beautifully styled pantry. It simply helps if everybody has some idea of which food is ordinary household food and which food has been bought for a particular Christmas meal.

You might keep baking ingredients together in one cupboard or basket. Christmas snacks could have their own shelf. A section of the fridge might be reserved for Christmas dinner ingredients as the day gets closer. Freezer items can be grouped together so you know what has already been prepared.

And if something is particularly important, label it.

This may sound excessive until somebody eats the exact ingredient you bought for a Christmas recipe because apparently placing it in the fridge was not considered sufficient evidence that it had plans.

A small amount of organisation here also helps prevent duplicate buying. If everything Christmas-related is scattered around the kitchen, it is much harder to remember what you already have.

It does not need to look beautiful. It just needs to make sense to the people using the kitchen.

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11. Think About the Christmas Table Before Christmas Day

The table is not really a kitchen job, but the kitchen and table inevitably meet once Christmas dinner begins.

If you are feeding more people than usual, it is worth thinking about the practicalities beforehand.

The Christmas Table Setting Checklist from my Christmas Table Companion is useful here.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS TABLE SETTING CHECKLIST

Check that you have enough chairs, plates, glasses and cutlery for the people who are actually coming. Think about serving dishes, spoons and anything particular you use for Christmas dinner. If you use a tablecloth, napkins, candles or crackers, find them before you need them.

And consider the slightly less glamorous question of whether everything will actually fit.

A beautiful centrepiece that occupies half the table may become considerably less charming once the potatoes, vegetables, sauces and drinks arrive.

If you are feeding a larger group than usual, setting the table loosely beforehand can reveal practical problems while they are still easy to solve.

The table does not need to look like a magazine photograph. It needs to accommodate the people, the food and the inevitable reaching across one another for something that is apparently always at the opposite end.

For more ideas, you can explore my Christmas Table Companion, and I’ll also be sharing a complete guide to creating a Beautiful, Relaxed Christmas Table.

EXPLORE THE CHRISTMAS TABLE COMPANION

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12. Give Christmas Eve’s Kitchen Jobs Their Own Place

By Christmas Eve, the kitchen should ideally be moving from preparation towards Christmas itself.

There will still be things to do. Depending on your menu, there may be vegetables to prepare, desserts to finish, food to defrost, drinks to chill or breakfast things to organise.

The difference is that those jobs are much easier when they are known rather than discovered one by one throughout the day.

This is where a Christmas Eve Checklist can be extremely useful.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS EVE CHECKLIST

Think specifically about the kitchen jobs that would make tomorrow easier. Perhaps the dishwasher can be emptied before bed. Bins can be dealt with. Worktops can be cleared. Serving dishes can be put somewhere accessible. Breakfast things can be organised. Anything needed from the freezer can be moved to the fridge at the appropriate time.

It can also be worth checking the Christmas Day cooking plan one last time while the kitchen is relatively quiet.

But Christmas Eve should not become an endless attempt to get the kitchen into a state of perfection that will disappear approximately eleven minutes after everyone wakes the following morning.

Do what genuinely helps tomorrow. Clean up after the final preparation. Then let Christmas Eve be Christmas Eve.

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13. Make Christmas Morning Easy on the Kitchen Too

Christmas morning deserves a little thought because the kitchen can become busy remarkably quickly.

People want tea or coffee. Breakfast appears. Wrapping paper somehow migrates towards every room. Somebody wants to know when dinner is. Something needs taking out of the fridge. If there are younger children, the morning may begin very early; if there are teenagers, Christmas breakfast may be happening at a rather more civilised hour than it once did.

It helps to decide breakfast beforehand.

That does not mean planning an elaborate Christmas breakfast unless that is something your family genuinely loves. Perhaps you always have something special. Perhaps pastries, fruit and plenty of tea are perfect. Maybe you cook a big breakfast every year and would not dream of changing it.

The useful thing is simply knowing what breakfast is and having what you need.

Set out anything that makes the morning easier the night before. Make sure tea, coffee and mugs are accessible. If something needs defrosting or moving in preparation for dinner, add that to the Christmas Eve list rather than relying on somebody remembering it between presents.

My Christmas Morning Companion has more ideas for creating a Christmas morning that suits the family you have now, particularly as traditions and routines change over the years.

EXPLORE THE CHRISTMAS MORNING COMPANION

The kitchen’s job on Christmas morning is not to perform. It is simply to support whatever Christmas morning looks like in your house.

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14. Make a Christmas Day Cooking Plan

This may be the most practically useful part of the entire Christmas Kitchen Companion.

Christmas dinner often involves several dishes that need cooking, reheating, resting or keeping warm at roughly the same time, frequently in one oven.

The Christmas Oven & Cooking Schedule gives all of that somewhere to live.

PRINT: CHRISTMAS OVEN & COOKING SCHEDULE

Start with the time you would roughly like to eat and work backwards. Write down how long the main dish needs to cook and whether it needs to rest. Then look at everything else requiring oven space.

Ask practical questions before Christmas Day rather than while standing in front of an open oven door:

• What needs the oven?
• At what temperature?
• What can cook together?
• What needs hob space instead?
• What can be prepared or cooked earlier and reheated?
• What can be served at room temperature?
• What can cook while the meat rests?
• Is there anything somebody else can be responsible for?

The oven is often the real limiting factor in Christmas dinner rather than the number of recipes. Four dishes that all require the same oven at four different temperatures at precisely 1.15 p.m. need a little more thought than four dishes written neatly on a menu.

The schedule does not have to be followed to the minute. Dinner will survive being slightly later than planned. Something may take longer than expected. Someone will almost certainly distract you.

Its job is simply to give you the broad order of things so that you are not repeatedly calculating cooking times in your head while the kitchen is at its busiest.

And if Christmas dinner arrives on the table twenty minutes later than planned, I have yet to hear of Christmas being cancelled as a result.

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15. Don’t Make One Person Run the Entire Christmas Kitchen

One of the easiest ways for Christmas cooking to become exhausting is for one person to quietly become responsible for everything.

Sometimes this happens simply because one person knows the plan. They know where everything is, what time dinner is supposed to happen, which serving dish is needed, what is in the oven and what needs doing next.

Knowing all of that does not mean they have to personally do all of it.

There are plenty of Christmas kitchen jobs that can belong to somebody else. Depending on the ages and abilities of the people around you, someone can set the table, peel vegetables, prepare one dish, keep drinks topped up, load or empty the dishwasher, clear plates, make tea, feed pets, deal with rubbish and recycling or put leftovers away.

Teenagers and older children can be particularly useful here if given an actual job rather than a vague request to “help”.

If someone is in charge of drinks, let them be in charge of drinks. If somebody is doing dessert, that is their job. If another person is clearing after dinner, resist the temptation to supervise every plate.

Sharing the work is not about creating a rota for Christmas Day. It simply means that the person cooking dinner also gets to be a person having Christmas.

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16. Make Space for What Happens After Christmas Dinner

There is a slightly optimistic tendency in Christmas food planning to stop at the moment dinner reaches the table.

The food, unfortunately, does not.

There will be leftovers. Half-used ingredients. Open packets. Serving dishes. Food that needs cooling and storing. A fridge that somehow has to accommodate everything again.

Before Christmas, make sure you have a few suitable containers for leftovers. They do not need to match. They simply need lids.

Then think about what your household genuinely enjoys eating afterwards.

Perhaps St Stephen’s Day is all about turkey sandwiches. Maybe you make something particular with leftover ham. Perhaps everybody wants a plate of bits and pieces from the fridge and nobody has the slightest interest in another formal meal.

This is also where your Favourite Christmas Recipes page can become lovely to keep from year to year. The recipes that become family Christmas favourites are not always the impressive ones. Sometimes they are the soup made from leftovers, the particular sandwich everybody loves or the easy supper eaten in pyjamas the following evening.

PRINT: FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS RECIPES

The days after Christmas do not need another elaborate food plan. In many houses, one of the pleasures of them is precisely that the fridge is full and nobody needs to cook very much at all.

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17. Do One Final Kitchen Check — and Then Leave It Alone

A day or two before Christmas, have one final look around.

Not with the eyes of someone trying to find another job.

With the eyes of someone checking that the kitchen can do what you need it to do.

Is the main food organised? Is there enough fridge and freezer space? Are the important ingredients there? Do you know roughly what needs preparing on Christmas Eve? Is the cooking schedule ready? Have you found the serving dishes? Is there something easy for breakfast? Are there dishwasher tablets?

If the answer to most of those questions is yes, the kitchen is probably ready.

Nobody needs to clean the cutlery drawer.

Nobody needs to reorganise the spices.

The top of the fridge can remain whatever mysterious territory it has been for the rest of the year.

There will always be another cupboard that could be tidied and another job that could theoretically be done. At some point, preparation has to give way to using the room we have prepared.

The kitchen is allowed to look lived in at Christmas.

In fact, it almost certainly will.

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18. Remember What the Christmas Kitchen Is Actually For

For all the planning, lists, menus and cooking schedules, I don’t think the Christmas kitchens we remember are particularly tidy ones.

They are busy.

Someone is leaning against the counter talking while something cooks. Somebody has wandered in looking for food despite having eaten a substantial meal remarkably recently. There are mugs beside the kettle and crumbs on the worktop. Someone steals something from a tray before it reaches the table. Music is playing. The dishwasher seems to have been running since dawn.

There may be people squeezed around the table who are rarely all in the same place. There may be a teenager appearing briefly before disappearing again. Someone makes another pot of tea. A dog is extremely interested in developments around the roasting tin.

And by the evening there are leftovers in mismatched containers, half-open boxes on the counter and glasses that apparently reproduce whenever nobody is looking.

That is not what remains after the Christmas kitchen has gone wrong.

That is the Christmas kitchen.

The reason we cleared a little space, checked the cupboards, planned the food and worked out the oven was never so the kitchen could remain perfectly prepared. We did it so that when Christmas arrived, the room could absorb it.

A kitchen is meant to be used. At Christmas, perhaps more than at any other time of year, it becomes one of those ordinary places where an extraordinary amount of family life passes through.

If the food gets cooked, people get fed, there is somewhere to make another cup of tea and you manage to sit down for at least some of it, I would call that a kitchen that did its job very well indeed.

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Your Free Christmas Kitchen Companion

If you would like a little practical help getting your own kitchen ready, you can download my free Christmas Kitchen Companion and print whichever pages would be useful in your home this year.

The complete collection includes:

• Christmas Kitchen Essentials
• Christmas Meal Planner
• Christmas Food Shopping List
• Christmas Kitchen Prep Timeline
• Christmas Menu Planner
• Christmas Oven & Cooking Schedule
• Christmas Kitchen To-Do List
• Favourite Christmas Recipes
• Christmas Kitchen Notes

You can keep the full collection in a Christmas binder and bring it out each year, or use only the pages you need. A household hosting twelve people for Christmas dinner will naturally need a different plan from one spending Christmas Day elsewhere.

The printables are not there to prescribe what your Christmas kitchen should look like.

They are simply there to make the kitchen you already have a little easier to live and celebrate in.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE CHRISTMAS KITCHEN COMPANION

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Before You Go…

If you are preparing for Christmas more widely, you might also like my Free Christmas Printables Library, where all of the Christmas collections live together. You’ll find printables for Christmas planning, homemaking, hospitality, baking, decorating, the Christmas table, Christmas morning and a slower Christmas, alongside the Kitchen Companion we’ve used here.

Choose the pages that are useful for your household and leave the others for another year, or another kind of Christmas.

EXPLORE ALL FREE CHRISTMAS PRINTABLES

And if you enjoy these conversations about home, family, seasons and the ordinary rhythms that make up our days, you can join me for Our Little Friday Letter, my little letter from our house to yours every second Friday morning.

JOIN OUR LITTLE FRIDAY LETTER

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Continue Exploring Christmas

How to Plan Christmas Without the Stress: A Simple Christmas Planning Guide
A practical Christmas planning guide for getting dates, gifts, budgets, food and the other details of December out of your head and into one manageable plan.

Christmas Homemaking: How to Create a Cosy Christmas Home Without the Stress
A thoughtful, practical guide to preparing your home for Christmas without turning December into a quest for a perfect house.

Christmas Hospitality: How to Create a Warm and Welcoming Home for Your Guests
A complete guide to welcoming people into your home at Christmas, from overnight guests and food to the small details that help people feel comfortable.

15 Great Christmas Baking Ideas for Cosy December Days
Simple Christmas baking inspiration for the days when being in the kitchen is part of the pleasure rather than another job to get through.

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The Christmas kitchen does not need to stay beautifully prepared. It only needs to be ready enough for Christmas, and all the wonderfully ordinary life that comes with it.

Chat soon,

Ciara x

🖨️ Create Your Christmas Companion Binder

If you’re planning to print several of our Christmas companions, a few simple supplies can make it easy to create your own beautiful Christmas binder to enjoy year after year.

(This section contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting Our Little House in the Country.)

• 📗 A4 Display Book
• 📁 A4 Ring Binder
• 📄 Plastic Document Wallets
• 📎 Adjustable Hole Punch
• 🖊️ Fine-liner Pens
• 📑 Divider Tabs

• Christmas Homemaking: How to Create a Cosy Christmas Home Without the Stress
  Christmas homemaking isn’t about creating a perfect house for December. Discover practical, thoughtful ways to prepare your home, simplify Christmas, create a cosy atmosphere and make room for the people and ordinary moments that matter most.
• Getting the Kitchen Ready for Christmas: A Practical Guide to a Calm Christmas Kitchen
  A practical guide to getting your kitchen ready for Christmas, from checking supplies and making space to planning food, baking, Christmas dinner and leftovers.
• How to Plan Christmas Without the Stress: A Simple Christmas Planning Guide
  Christmas planning does not have to mean turning December into one enormous to-do list. A thoughtful plan can help you organise the practical things early, reduce the mental load and leave more room for the people, traditions and ordinary moments you actually want to enjoy.
• Christmas Hospitality: How to Create a Warm and Welcoming Home for Your Guests
  Christmas hospitality isn’t about creating a perfect home or spending the season waiting on everyone else. From easy breakfasts and relaxed meals to thoughtful little details that help guests truly feel at home, here’s how to create a warm, welcoming Christmas for the people coming through your door — without overwhelming yourself in the process.
• 10 Gentle New Year’s Eve Rituals: Simple Ways to Ring in the Year at Home
  Skip the noise and welcome the new year with quiet joy. These 10 gentle New Year’s Eve rituals invite you to pause, reflect, and celebrate at home — simple, soulful ways to mark the turning of the year with gratitude and grace.