Christmas Picky Bits: The Festive Grazing Table for the Evening Nobody Wants a Proper Dinner

Christmas picky bits are essentially a festive grazing dinner: lots of small savoury things served together so everyone can help themselves throughout the evening.

Think good bread, cheeses, little hot snacks, salads, nuts, crisps, dips, charcuterie if you like it, and whatever interesting things you've discovered while Christmas food shopping.

It's somewhere between a cheeseboard, drinks snacks and dinner.

Except I don't think it needs a particularly strict definition.

If you'd happily stand in front of the fridge and pick at it, it probably has potential.

I love cooking.

I also love a good supermarket.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

For Christmas picky bits, I'll happily make a couple of salads myself and put them next to ready-made meatballs.

A good cheese from a local farm shop can sit next to mini frikandellen from the supermarket.

Nobody is checking.

In fact, I think the combination makes the table better.

I'll usually go somewhere with a particularly big selection - an Albert Heijn XL or Jumbo Foodmarkt, for example - and actually look around rather than arrive with an exact shopping list.

Then I'll visit one of our local farm shops for good cheeses and other things that catch my eye.

I'm not trying to recreate exactly the same board every Christmas.

Looking for something new is part of the tradition.

I don't work from an exact menu, but there is a loose formula underneath our Christmas Eve table.

Bread + cheese + something fresh + something homemade + something hot + something crunchy + one wildcard.

Start with something you can tear, cut or pick at.

A good bread works perfectly, especially with cheese or a salad alongside it.

It also makes a grazing table feel more like dinner without requiring an actual main course.

This is where I would rather have a small amount of something genuinely delicious than an enormous generic cheese board.

Local farm shops are brilliant for this because you can find cheeses you wouldn't necessarily pick up during an ordinary supermarket shop.

Choose a few that are actually different from each other rather than six variations on the same thing.

Bitterballen. Mini frikandellen. Meatballs. Little oven snacks.

Christmas Eve is not the evening when I need every dish to demonstrate culinary ambition.

If something hot, crispy and delicious comes out of an oven or air fryer and everyone immediately reaches for it, it has done its job.

This is where I like adding homemade salads or another dish I've felt like making.

It gives the table something personal without creating a situation where I've spent the entire afternoon preparing fourteen individual recipes.

Make the things where homemade genuinely makes a difference to you.

Buy the rest.

Nuts. Crisps. Olives, if you like them.

Little snacks that can sit around happily while the evening continues.

These are particularly important later, when nobody is technically eating dinner anymore but everybody is somehow still eating.

Find something you haven't had before.

Christmas supermarket ranges are full of slightly ridiculous little things at this time of year. Some will be brilliant. Some won't.

Pick one.

It keeps the board from becoming exactly the same every year.

Our Christmas Eve table looks full.

Deliberately.

I love that sense of abundance at Christmas.

But that doesn't mean I need twelve meatballs.

Four can be perfectly adequate.

A little cheese. A few pieces of something hot. A small bowl of salad. Some nuts. A handful of something crunchy.

For a grazing table, abundance comes from variety more than quantity.

I'd much rather have ten little choices than enormous quantities of four things.

I've seen cheese cut into stars, rosemary forests, intricately arranged wreaths and things that presumably required tweezers.

Lovely.

I'm not doing it.

Our table isn't covered in special Christmas crockery either.

There will be one large board, then bowls and little dishes scattered around it. If something is sitting in a marinade, obviously it gets a plate rather than being poured directly onto the furniture.

Beyond that, we're not very formal about it.

Candles do most of the aesthetic heavy lifting.

And then we eat with our fingers.

The food should look inviting enough that you want to eat it, not so perfect that you're frightened to touch it.

I like the moment when the table is full.

So most of our picky bits arrive together rather than in carefully planned courses.

That means we can sit down and stay sitting down.

There might be another hot snack later, and once the film is properly underway there's every chance the crisps or popcorn will appear.

But I'm not spending Christmas Eve getting up every fifteen minutes to plate the next thing.

Whatever you actually like.

I'll happily have a nice red wine.

Bas is more likely to have a special beer.

Coca-Cola Light is always perfectly welcome too.

A grazing table already contains lots of different flavours, so this isn't the occasion where I would construct an elaborate drinks pairing for every item.

Open something you enjoy and get back to the film.

This is really why I love this tradition.

I want to be on the sofa.

I want a Christmas film on.

I want Bas and me opening our presents.

I want to reach over and take another little something from the table because it looks good.

I want candles burning and the Christmas lights on.

Why should every special meal require everyone to sit formally around a dining table?

Sometimes the most festive thing you can do is remove the formality.