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This year, 2025, has seen us become more and more off-grid and self-sufficient here on our tropical homestead. We left Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and almost 3 months ago, we stopped shopping in supermarkets. All of these things have been easy. But what about our typical family Christmas traditions? How will those change this year?
We are trying to make Christmas as eco-friendly and as off-grid as possible, and at the same time not give money to huge corporations. We want to keep our cash in local pockets. Here are a few ways we are having to change.
Of course, tending the almost 100 animals on the farm and any gardening that needs doing will still happen on Christmas Day. We don’t need a break from that; it’s lovely to connect with what’s going on outside as the sun rises every morning. Christmas will be a very normal day on the farm in that respect.
A More Eco-Friendly Christmas, Without Supermarkets or Shopping Online
Since we started shopping locally only, we have saved a lot of money. Not going into big stores has made us work with what we have, and go without things we don’t need. It’s been a great experience and experiment.
I was a vegetarian for most of my life, vegan for a few, today we eat good quality meat, fish, and eggs plus local, home grown, or organic veg, honey, and more. It’s what works for us, ethically, and for our health.
I’ve always felt that Christmas gets in the way of our lives. We lead a very happy life, nobody works full-time, we’re together as a family of 4 constantly. At the same time, I miss my family in the UK and having Christmas in summer has never felt right. So now that the pressure to make Christmas special for young kids is off my shoulders, I’d rather skip the whole thing.
But, I love to cook them good food, every day. The Christmas meals will just be a little more special than our typical daily meals.
We don”t adhere to any particular religion, but respect them all.
Christmas Eve Meal
On Christmas Eve, we normally celebrate with a cold buffet of prawns, oysters, cheeses and cold meats, with good bread or crackers. That’s easy to do here. Prawns are fished locally, and our fishmonger carries plenty of wild-caught, not farmed, seafood.
Our local deli is making its own wild-caught smoked salmon. My order is placed. They have plenty of cold meats and cheeses, of much higher quality than anything we can buy in the supermarket.
Our Seasonal, Local, Christmas Dinner or Lunch
We could have harvested one of our own turkeys for Christmas, but instead we chose to support our local, family-owned butcher and deli for meats. We have no need at all to use supermarkets for our meat, and we haven’t for years.
While we could be self-sufficient in lamb, chicken or turkey, butchering is a very big job, and the butcher helps me out there. I did butcher a turkey recently, and got 1 kg of turkey mince plus scraps for the cats and stock. I think our own birds, eating a natural diet, are lower in fat and don’t have the added water, so they make for quite a lean bird that’s hard to roast.
I made turkey burgers with some of the mince, they were very lean. Next time, I’ll add some minced pork for the fat content.
I normally cook a traditional British Christmas dinner or lunch for my family, I have for decades. I have a few side dishes that I always cook. These include Brussels sprouts with a sour cream, mustard, honey, and bacon dressing, pigs in blankets, roast parsnips, red cabbage with apple, and more.
Brussels sprouts are, of course, completely out of season in an Australian tropical summer, so, while I have bought over-priced, unseasonal supermarket sprouts in previous years, this year I won’t.
If sprouts appear in winter at our local market, we’ll hold a Brussels sprout celebration day for them. They are worth celebrating.
I don’t think I would be able to source sour cream or raw cured bacon other than from the supermarket. Hot-cured bacon (as is typically found in supermarkets in Australia) just doesn’t work for pigs in blankets; it’s too stiff. “British Bacon” a cold-cured brand sold in Coles and Woolworths, isn’t available anywhere else. So I guess we’ll have to go without.
The veg we eat with our Christmas roasts will be whatever is available at the last market before Christmas. Last week, there was red cabbage and parsnips, so hopefully we’ll be able to buy those. There were no carrots last week. Fingers crossed they’ll have some next Saturday for my carrots in orange butter sauce. They should have oranges, but my tree has none right now. Citrus is in season after Christmas. Next year I’ll freeze juice for Christmas.
Fresh cranberries are typically impossible to buy here for cranberry sauce, so I make a pomegranate and orange sauce instead. We have a pomegranite tree, but it hasn’t fruited yet. I noticed that the butcher is selling their own cranberry sauce this year. So maybe I’ll buy some ready-made.
In the UK, we make a Christmas pudding, usually in October, ready for Christmas Day. This is the first year I haven’t made one. Sourcing suet is always really difficult, and all of those dried fruits are pretty extravagant and hard to organise. Instead, we will make pavlova and trifle, with our own eggs for custard, passion fruit and mango from the garden, and local dairy milk.
I do have jelly in the cupboard from our supermarket days. Once that is gone, our trifles will be jelly-less.
Maybe I’ll make some other pie instead of mince pies. Pineapple pies could be our new tradition, these fruits are in season in December, and I’m planning loads more pineapples for next year. Or even pumpkin pie, I’ve never made it, it’s not usually found in the UK.
The kids don’t really like Christmas pudding anyway.
What Fruit and Veg is in The Garden at Christmas?
In previous years, I’ve had good bush beans for Christmas Dinner; this year, they’ve failed.
There is abundant passion fruit, cucumbers, some tomatoes, herbs, a few mangos, papaya (paw paw) and pineapples. There are always herbs, including garlic chives, mother of herbs, parsley, there is a little dill left, mint, and Greek oregano. We are fully self-sufficient now in tropical greens. Sweet potato tops, longevity spinach, sweet leaf and kale are all abundant in December.
My pumpkins haven’t pumpkined as yet, they’re easy to buy at the market. We don’t traditionally eat pumpkin in the UK but it’s creeping onto our plates lately. We had a thriving pumpkin patch here for the first few years, but once the turkeys and geese started free ranging, it killed them off. I’m starting over with growing pumpkins.
All of the traditional British vegetables that we normally eat at Christmas are winter crops here. December is summer in the tropics of the Southern Hemisphere.
Christmas Cards and Gifts
We normally send a handful of cards to faraway friends and family. This year, our cards were from a local artist at the market.
Normally, we do our Christmas shopping on Amazon because we live in a very remote location, 2 hours from a small shopping mall. Not this year. My kids really don’t need the fancy Lego sets that I usually buy them. All of our gifts will be local or ethical. Chocolate will be a big player as we are blessed with several local chocolate farms.
Nobody needs anything, it seems pointless to buy things we don’t need. Maybe I’ll be able to find a few treats for them all. Not buying many gifts also takes a lot of the stress out of Christmas shopping.
Christmas Decorations
I made the decision weeks ago to not buy any new Christmas decor this year. I probably would have bought more lights, maybe a new tree, but we can easily just use what we have already. A small tree that I bought in London over 22 years ago, tree decorations collected over our lifetime together. They are more special than anything new.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have even put the tiny tree up if my other family members hadn’t asked me to do so.
Christmas Day
We normally start Christmas Day with gifts and then a swim at the beach. We’ll probably do that again this year before I have to start cooking.
We are a family of Doctor Who lovers, and the Christmas Doctor Who is normally on our screens. We normally buy Disney+ for a short period, just to watch that. It won’t be happening this year. Since Disney bought it, it’s not been great anyway.
At some point, I’ll get a DVD player and dust off our old DVDs.
Our music will be from my CDs, not Spotify, maybe from YouTube, I do use YouTube a lot, still. You can find real humans there.
That’s it, that’s all we do for Christmas. I’m going to miss those Brussels sprouts with my turkey, but I’ll come up with some other creative side dish with whatever is seasonal and available. Have a great holiday season wherever you are. Have you got any great ideas for a more eco-friendly or self-sustaining homestead Christmas? Put them in the comments for us to share. The next few days could be very interesting as we approach the solstice and new moon, stay safe, stay well, celebrate the holidays (or not) with your loved ones, in peace.
