I have PLENTY of time. Not.

It never fails. One minute, I’m regarding the calendar and snorting because I have so much free time it’s laughable. The next, it’s the day before Christmas Eve and I haven’t done A Thing.

Gads, I’m a bad parent sometimes. You know those parents who have a ritual around putting up a tree and decorations? Who have stories about special ornaments handmade by their great-great-aunt with arthritis from ration coupons they saved during the war? Who have lovingly preserved each and every recipe so as to reproduce faithfully a banquet from the nineteenth century? Yeah, nope, not me. After giving our last two artificial trees the thumbs down, we haven’t even bought a new one yet, and Christmas is just a couple of weeks away. Yikes!

(Then again, we don’t even have curtains for more than half the house, so what’s a tree between friends, right?)

One thing we have decided to follow is the Christmas Eve dinner thing. Because it’s so hot here in the tropics, you’d have to be a lunatic (are you listening, Australia?) to have a major food-fest at lunchtime. Interestingly enough, it’s also the same on the Continent. So, Malaysia and Poland are in agreement and a Christmas Eve dinner it is.

J abhors carp, the traditional Polish main dish. He tells me he’d rather eat wet tissue which, interestingly, resembles the texture of carp … or so he says. I wouldn’t know, having never eaten giant koi-type fish (hey, we keep them as pets!), but I’ll take his word for it.

On my side of the fence, it’s Portuguese Eurasian roast chicken. This is a family favourite, and is something I can make in my sleep, so it’s definitely on the menu. Vindaloo and devil curries are also traditional, but the kids still aren’t that much into the chilli-hot food (yet!), so I have to make a choice.

I like vindaloo because of the adventure. I say that because it’s not like the Indian curry of the same name at all. It’s fresher, a lighter red and quite vinegary (no surprise, as it’s based on a Portuguese dish cooked in vinegar sauce). The thing is, it’s also a finicky dish. Just add one spoon of vinegar too much and you’ll ruin the entire curry you’ve been slaving over for more than an hour. This is a curry that demands you taste CONSTANTLY! Eurasians have normally cooked this with chicken, but I like the texture of pork more, so that’s what I use. (And then I discovered that — hey! — pork was the traditional meat for the founding Portuguese dish too. Fantastic!)

The traditional salad I remember from my childhood days was An Abomination Of Nature. No other words for it. It put me off salads for decades. The basic ingredients were okay — lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, onions — but the dressing was, not to put too fine a point on it, the spawn of Satan. My mother used to make up some concoction that combined condensed milk with powdered mustard and enough water and milk (almost a cup) to form something with the consistency of swampy water. This would then get poured over the basic ingredients and let to soak for hours before serving. Believe me, it’s worse than it sounds.

Nowadays, we do a green salad with a freshly-made vinaigrette although, as we’re having a party this year, I might also add a pasta and asparagus salad.

In deference to the cold of the Polish winter, we’ll have some mulled red wine in addition to other, non-alcoholic refreshments. It goes down to about 25-27 degrees Celsius in these here parts around this time of year (in the evenings), so I think our fake fireplace (we lugged it all the way from Australia) will look very nice in the corner. We’ve had it on before (just the flames, not the heat) and visitors have loved it! And I’m trying to talk J into cooking his most excellent chicken briyani.

Dessert is where we all fall down. From watching Jacques Pepin, I know how to do a bulk order of Crepes Suzette in one go. And thanks to the Juniors’ cookbook (that’s Juniors of New York), I can whip up a mean NY-style baked cheesecake. Both are good do-ahead dishes. Some bought, good-quality ice-cream for those who want it and I think we’re done!

So, our menu is shaping up as follows:

• Chicken liver pate and one other dip to start (pesto? pimento? pumpkin? p-sour cream?) plus other cheap nibblies, like crisps and mixed nuts, and so on
• Roast chicken
• Pork vindaloo curry
• Something from J: chicken briyani or roast leg of lamb
• Potato dish, maybe a gratinée
• Two salads
• Rice
• NY baked cheesecake
• Sorta kinda Crepes Suzette

What about your Christmas do, for those having one? Care to share what you’re having? Are you going traditional, iconoclast, hybrid?