What to Put in a Christmas Hamper

What to Put in a Christmas Hamper

There's a moment, somewhere around the second week of December, when you realise you've said yes to more people than you have gifts for. The neighbour. Your sister-in-law. The woman at work who covered your shift in July and you've been meaning to thank ever since.

A hamper is the answer to all three, which is why it has been the default Australian Christmas gift for about a hundred years. The trouble is that most hampers are built backwards, starting with the basket and working inwards, and you end up paying for ribbon.

So here's the practical version. What goes in, what to leave out, and how to put one together that gets eaten rather than admired.

The one rule

A hamper should be mostly food, and food the person will actually finish.

That's it. Everything below is just working that rule out in detail.

It sounds obvious until you look at what's in the average hamper on a department store shelf. Shredded paper. A wicker basket nobody needs and everybody keeps out of guilt. Three kinds of chutney, which become three open jars in the fridge door until someone throws them out in autumn.

None of that is a gift. It's packaging with a gift somewhere inside it.

What to put in a Christmas hamper

Think of it in four parts. You don't need all four, but a hamper with three of them is a good hamper.

Something they'll eat as a meal. This is the part most hampers skip, and it's the part that gets used first. Something that solves an actual dinner, on an actual night, is worth more than any number of small jars. In December especially, when everybody is cooking more than usual and enjoying it less.

Something to drink. Wine if you know their taste, and genuinely good coffee or tea if you don't. Non-alcoholic options have got dramatically better in the last few years, so this is no longer the awkward corner of a hamper it used to be.

Something sweet. The easy one. Shortbread, a pudding, good chocolate, panforte. Christmas is permission for this and everybody knows it.

One small treat they wouldn't buy for themselves. Not three, one. The really good olive oil, the proper honey, the salt that costs more than salt has any business costing. This is the part that reads as thoughtful, and it only works if it's singular. Six luxuries is a shop, one luxury is a gift.

 

What to leave out

Anything that needs to be eaten immediately. Fresh produce in an Australian December is a gamble, and the loser is whoever opens the box.

More than one of anything. Two jams is not twice as good as one jam. It's one jam and a spare.

Novelty anything. The sauce with the funny name. The chilli jam rated in skulls. They photograph beautifully and they sit unopened.

A basket they'll have to store. If the container isn't useful on its own, it's a second gift nobody asked for.

Anything you haven't checked for allergies. Especially nuts, especially in an office order.

Christmas hamper ideas by who it's for

For a family. Volume matters here more than refinement. A family hamper wants meals that feed everyone at once, something sweet the kids will get to first, and enough of it that it doesn't vanish on the first night. Skip the delicate things, they won't survive contact.

For new parents. The best gift on this list and it isn't close. New parents do not need another muslin wrap. They need dinner, at 7pm, on the night the baby has finally gone down and neither of them can face standing up. A hamper of meals is the gift people still mention a year later. Ours can arrive with a personalised card, with vegetarian options if you're not sure what they're eating now.

For parents and grandparents. The people who have everything, which is the standard complaint every year. What they don't have is someone cooking for them. Handmade meals in the freezer for the nights when cooking feels like more than they've got. Practical and affectionate at once, which is a rarer combination in a gift than it should be.

For someone living alone. Portion size is the whole game. Meals for one, so nothing is wasted and nobody eats the same thing four days running. Good for the friend who says they're fine.

For someone having a hard year. Grief, illness, a run of bad months. Food is what people bring when they don't know what to say, and that instinct has lasted for a reason. Our bereavement and condolence hampers exist for exactly this, and they're how a lot of people find FoodSt in the first place.

For the office. A different problem, covered properly below.

Building your own hamper

Worth doing, if you have the time and you're making one or two.

Start with the box, not a basket. A sturdy box, a bit of tissue, done. Put the heaviest things at the bottom, which sounds obvious and is the mistake everybody makes once. Fill gaps with something edible rather than shredded paper, because paper is volume you paid for.

Write the card by hand. It's the difference between a delivery and a gift, and it takes two minutes.

Then be honest about the maths. A homemade hamper for one person is a lovely afternoon. Twelve of them, in December, while also doing everything else December asks of you, is a second job. There's no prize for assembling them yourself, and the people receiving them can't tell.

Corporate and office hampers

The work list is the one everybody leaves until the second week of December, and it has its own problems. You're buying for people whose tastes you don't know, in quantity, and it has to arrive on a working day.

Food suits this better than most options because it's genuinely neutral. No sizing, no strong opinions, nothing anyone has to pretend to like. It reads as generous without being personal, which is the right register for a client or a team member.

Two practical notes. Check dietary requirements before you order in bulk, because a vegetarian staff member receiving a ham is a small but very memorable own goal. And do it in November if you possibly can, while you still have the headspace to think about it properly.

If you're organising for a workplace, get in touch and we'll help you work out what makes sense for the size of your list.

What's changed about hampers lately

A few things worth knowing if you haven't bought one in a while.

Meals have replaced novelties. The shift over the last few years has been away from the jar-of-something hamper and towards food people eat as food. Partly cost of living, partly that everyone has worked out the jars weren't getting opened.

Frozen has stopped being a compromise. It used to mean fresh wasn't available. Now it means the hamper can be delivered a fortnight before Christmas and simply wait in the freezer until the quiet week between Christmas and New Year, when nobody wants to cook again. That's often when it gets its best use.

Smaller and better beats bigger. The oversized hamper has lost its appeal. Fewer things, chosen properly, reads as more thoughtful than a large box padded out to look generous.

People want to know who made it. There's a real difference between a box assembled from wholesale stock and one containing food a person cooked. It's the difference between a gift that's been bought and one that's been chosen.

What's in a FoodSt hamper

Ours are built around meals, because that's the part that gets used.

Every dish is handmade in small batches by local home cooks across Australia, real people cooking the recipes they grew up with, from family recipes and real ingredients. They arrive freshly frozen, so a hamper can be delivered well before Christmas and wait in the freezer until it's needed.

You can add a printed personalised message card, choose vegetarian options, and top the box up with extras. We deliver across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Newcastle, Wollongong, the Central Coast, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, and a great many places in between.

Our Christmas range opens in October, if you'd like to see the festive side of it.

The short version

Mostly food. Food they'll finish. One nice thing rather than six. A card you wrote yourself.

Get those four right and it doesn't much matter whether you built it at the kitchen table or ordered it in five minutes, which, in December, is a genuinely reasonable thing to do. And if you want more gift ideas you can always see our full range of meal delivery services here.