Christmas
Christmas gifts for family in Australia from the UK
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Christmas in Australia: Traditions, Food and What the Day Is Really Like
Christmas in Australia is a summer day: prawns, pav, carols and cricket. The traditions, what's on the table, the music and decorations, and the UK time difference.
The short answer
Christmas in Australia and its traditions
Australia during Christmas is a summer holiday. Christmas Day is on 25 December, the same date as the UK, but families spend it swimming, eating a long outdoor lunch of prawns, cold ham and pavlova, and playing cricket in the backyard. Boxing Day is a public holiday too, and this year NSW adds another on Monday 28 December.
If someone you love is spending Christmas in Sydney or anywhere else in Australia, this is what their day will actually look like, how it lines up with yours (Sydney is 11 hours ahead on the day), and the small ways to be part of it from the UK. One of them: you can send a gift to Australia from the UK that's packed by hand in Sydney, so it never goes through customs.
What a typical Australian Christmas Day looks like
Strip away the tinsel and the shape of the day is familiar. Kids are up stupidly early, there's a pile of presents under a tree, and somebody has been in the kitchen since dawn. The differences start with the weather. Sydney's average December top is 25.3°C, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's long-run figures for Observatory Hill. That's the average. Some Christmas Days are far hotter, and a few are grey and drizzly, which nobody plans for.
So the day bends around the heat. A lot of families have a swim before lunch, at the beach or in a pool if they're lucky enough to know someone with one. The big meal is usually Christmas lunch, not dinner, and it's often served cold or straight off the barbecue. The afternoon is for backyard cricket, a nap, or both at once. By evening it's leftovers, a walk, maybe a second swim, and a sunset that doesn't arrive until around 8pm.
That last bit is the one that gets Brits. On 25 December the sun sets in London just before 4pm. In Sydney it's still light enough to read outside after dinner.
Australian Christmas traditions, one by one
Prawns, seafood and the cold ham
If one food says Christmas in Australia, it's prawns: peeled at the table, with a bowl for the shells and lemon wedges everywhere. Seafood platters, oysters and a glazed ham sit alongside, with big salads and cherries or mango for picking at. Plenty of families still do a roast turkey out of loyalty to the old country, and plenty of cooks quietly resent it.
The pav
Pavlova is the Christmas pudding of an Aussie summer: a crisp meringue, whipped cream and fresh fruit, usually passionfruit on top. Don't bring up who invented it. Australia and New Zealand both claim it, and nobody wins that argument at a family table.
The backyard, the pool or the beach
Where you eat depends on who's hosting. A backyard with a table under a shade sail, a pool with an esky (a cool box) full of drinks, or a picnic rug on the sand. Expect at least one relative to fall asleep in a camping chair.
Cricket, on the lawn and on the telly
Backyard cricket after lunch is close to compulsory, with house rules nobody wrote down. Then on Boxing Day the serious stuff starts. This year's Boxing Day Test is Australia v New Zealand at the MCG in Melbourne, from 26 to 30 December, starting at 10.30am. That's 11.30pm on Christmas night in the UK, so a cricket-mad dad can watch the first ball before bed.
Carols by Candlelight
Cities and towns hold outdoor carol concerts through December, with families on picnic rugs holding candles as it gets dark. The big televised one is Vision Australia's Carols by Candlelight at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, on Christmas Eve at 8pm, broadcast on Channel 9. That's 9am on Christmas Eve in the UK. Sydney's own big one is Carols in the Domain, run by the Salvation Army.
Santa in boardies and thongs
The Australian Santa still has the beard and the hat. Below that, he swaps the fur-trimmed jacket for boardshorts and thongs (flip-flops, before you worry), and he's sometimes drawn in an Akubra hat. Some songs and picture books swap the reindeer for kangaroos, though most kids will tell you it's still reindeer, and they leave carrots out to prove it.
And yes, Christmas in July
Some Australians hold a second, wintry "Christmas in July" with a hot roast and mulled wine, because the craving for a cold Christmas never quite goes away. The BBC has a good piece on where it came from. The real one is still 25 December.
What an Australian Christmas dinner can look like
Earlier in this guide we covered the stars of the table: prawns, ham and pav. This is the rest of it, and the reason it leans cold.
Part of the answer is food safety. In New South Wales the Food Authority's Christmas advice is to keep hot food at 60°C or hotter, keep the fridge at or below 5°C, and throw out leftovers that have sat on the table for more than two hours. On a hot afternoon, a cold spread that lives in the fridge until the last minute is simply the easier way to do it. Plenty of hosts still roast something hot as well, which is how a lot of tables end up with both.
So there isn't one Australian Christmas dinner. Here are three tables you might be asked to sit at.
| The table | What's on it | Why it looks like that |
|---|---|---|
| The seafood table | Prawns, oysters, cold ham, salads, bread rolls, pavlova | Sydney Fish Market expected to sell over 350 tonnes of seafood, including 120 tonnes of prawns, in its 36-hour pre-Christmas marathon in 2025 |
| The roast-in-shorts table | Turkey or ham, roast potatoes, gravy, a pudding | English, Irish and Scottish are three of the five most common ancestries in the 2021 Census (33.0%, 9.5% and 8.6%), which goes some way to explaining why the roast survives the heat |
| Somebody else's recipes | Whatever that family cooks at home | 27.6% of people in Australia were born overseas, so plenty of Christmas lunches bring another country's food |
Ask five families in Aus what's on their table and you'll get five menus, which is the honest answer to what an Australian xmas dinner looks like. The leftovers usually turn into sandwiches, and they get a proper run, because Boxing Day is a public holiday. In 2026 it falls on Saturday 26 December, so NSW adds a further public holiday on Monday 28 December.
Christmas in Sydney: the harbour, the beaches, the fireworks
Sydney does Christmas with a postcard behind it. Here's what fills the week.
- Christmas Day at the beach. Bondi is busy on Christmas Day, and it's a favourite with travellers from overseas who want a swim and a photo for home. It's an alcohol-free beach under Waverley Council's alcohol-free zones, as are Bronte and Tamarama, so the beers stay at home. Swim between the flags.
- Boxing Day on the water. The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race starts on Sydney Harbour on 26 December, a 628 nautical mile race that's been running since 1945. If they're anywhere near the water that afternoon, it's worth a look.
- New Year's Eve fireworks. The City of Sydney's harbour fireworks go off at 9pm and midnight. Midnight in Sydney is 1pm on 31 December in the UK, so you can watch their New Year arrive over lunch, then do your own eleven hours later.
Australian Christmas music and decorations
If you want to know what's playing at their end, it's more than Jingle Bells in thongs. And the decorations come with some surprises.
The carols that were written to sound Australian
In 1948 the composer William G. James published a first set of five Australian Christmas carols, with words by his ABC colleague John Wheeler. The titles tell you where it's headed: "The Three Drovers", "Carol of the Birds" and "Christmas Bush for His Adorning". More sets followed. Add one or two to the shared playlist from the end of this guide and you'll have a track your side has probably never heard.
Where the candles come from
Carols by Candlelight began in Melbourne in 1938. Vision Australia, which runs it today, says it was founded by the radio broadcaster Norman Banks, that the first one was held in Alexandra Gardens, and that it's the oldest and most prominent Christmas entertainment event in Australia. The 2026 one is on Christmas Eve, as in the time difference table below.
Decorations, and what grows for Christmas
Ask anyone in Aus about their xmas decorations and the honest answer is usually "whatever survives the heat". Some of the best ones aren't bought at all.
- The NSW Christmas bush. The red isn't petals. The Australian National Botanic Gardens explains that the calyx of each flower enlarges and turns red and papery as the flower dies, so it looks like four or five petals. Be careful with the name, because plants called Christmas bush in some other states are entirely different.
- Christmas beetles. The Australian Museum says the adults emerge close to the Christmas period, and they're brightly coloured and about 2 to 3 cm long. Expect one to bounce off a light on Christmas night.
- The living Christmas trees. The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney calls the Norfolk Island pine, the Queensland kauri pine and the Wollemi pine its "Christmas trees". The Wollemi pine was found in 1994 by a NSW National Parks officer, David Noble, in a remote gorge in Wollemi National Park, and fewer than 100 mature trees survive in the wild.
And the tree in the lounge room
Real trees are grown on Australian farms, and they're slow. One central-west NSW grower says a fir takes about 10 years from seedling to sale, and that most of its trees go through national retailers and markets. So if you're picturing a pine in the corner of a house in 30 degrees, it's real for some families and plastic for others, and nobody will mind which.
If you'd like something to turn up for the day, you can send a gift to Australia from the UK that we pack by hand in Sydney. For free Standard delivery, order by Tuesday 15 December for NSW, the ACT, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, Monday 14 December for WA, and Thursday 10 December for the NT and regional or remote addresses (11:59pm Sydney time).
What it feels like for Brits in Australia
Ask a Brit about a hot Christmas and you'll hear two things, often in the same breath. It's brilliant. And it doesn't feel like Christmas.
The brilliant part is obvious: a swim on Christmas morning, lunch outside, no frozen car windscreen. The strange part creeps up. The shops still play songs about snow while it's 30 degrees in the car park. Fake frost on a window in a heatwave looks faintly ridiculous. There's no dark at 4pm, no fire, no walk in a big coat with the pubs lit up, none of the cosy that tells your body it's Christmas. Lots of people say they miss the dark evenings more than they expected to miss anything.
Most make peace with it by keeping one or two things from home. A proper Christmas pudding, crackers on the table, the King's speech on catch-up. And a call home, timed right. Lewis, who packs our boxes in Sydney with Jess, grew up in the UK, and his mum Samantha still lives there. She wrote about the other side of it in Missing My Son in Australia: A Mum's Story.
The time difference on Christmas Day
In December the UK is on GMT and Sydney is on daylight saving, so Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart are 11 hours ahead. Brisbane is 10 hours ahead (Queensland doesn't do daylight saving), Adelaide 10 and a half, Darwin 9 and a half, and Perth 8. Here's how Christmas 2026 lines up.
| UK time | Sydney time | What's happening there |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 24 Dec, 9am | Thu 24 Dec, 8pm | Carols by Candlelight starts in Melbourne |
| Thu 24 Dec, 8pm | Fri 25 Dec, 7am | Christmas morning, presents |
| Fri 25 Dec, 1am | Fri 25 Dec, noon | Christmas lunch (you're asleep) |
| Fri 25 Dec, 7am to 10am | Fri 25 Dec, 6pm to 9pm | Fed, sunburnt, happy to talk: the best call window |
| Fri 25 Dec, 11.30pm | Sat 26 Dec, 10.30am | Boxing Day Test, first ball (Melbourne) |
| Thu 31 Dec, 1pm | Fri 1 Jan, midnight | Harbour fireworks, New Year |
If they're in Perth, take three hours off the Sydney column, so your 8am Christmas call reaches them at 4pm. Every city and every clock change is in our UK to Australia time difference guide.
How to be part of their Christmas from the UK
Time the call, and keep it short
There are two good slots. Christmas Eve evening in the UK catches their Christmas morning, so you can watch them open what you sent. Christmas morning in the UK, from about 7am, catches their evening, when lunch is done and the house has gone quiet. Avoid their lunchtime, which is the middle of your night and the middle of their chaos. And keep it short if the room is full. A ten minute call that lands at the right moment beats an hour of "can you hear me?".
Make a shared playlist
Start a shared playlist on whatever app you both use, and both add to it through December. Your side gets the snow songs, the school nativity tunes and the one your dad always sings wrong. Theirs gets whatever's playing in the car on the way to the beach. Play it on the day at both ends, eleven hours apart. It's daft and it works.
Send something to arrive before the day
You've got three routes, and they don't all close at the same time.
- Post it yourself, early. Royal Mail hasn't published 2026 international Christmas dates yet. In 2024, its last tracked date for Australia was Saturday 7 December, so aim to post by the end of November. Our guide to last Christmas posting dates to Australia has the detail, and anything edible has to get past Australia's food rules.
- Buy it locally. Order from a shop near them and have it delivered or collected. Quicker, nothing to declare, but you're choosing from a website you don't know.
- Have a box packed in Australia. That's what we do.
Lewis and Jess pack every Same Skies box by hand in Sydney, and Australia Post delivers it, so it's a domestic Australian delivery and your gift never goes through customs. Delivery is free on every box. For Christmas 2026, order by Tuesday 15 December for most of Australia (NSW, ACT, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania), Monday 14 December for WA, and Thursday 10 December for the NT and regional or remote addresses. Those cut-offs are 11:59pm Sydney time, which is 12:59pm UK time on the same day, so a lunch break order counts.
The Hug Away From Home Box is the obvious one for a hot Christmas: a Hand-Poured Soy Candle (poured in Australia), a Botanical Bath Soak, Marc de Champagne Truffles, Candy Kittens Strawberry sweets, a Crochet Comfort Companion and an A3 Matte Art Print. The print is unframed, so it suits someone with a wall and a drawing pin. And if it's a scorcher, the truffles want a spell in the fridge, which is the honest downside of a summer Christmas. Our Christmas gifts to Australia page has the full range, and if it's the food side they'd love, browse our hampers to Australia. Or build your own box and fill it yourself. For ideas by person, see our gift ideas to send to Australia from the UK.
Every box has a premium card with a QR code. Your words live behind it: a message, a photo or a video, which they open by pointing their phone camera at the code. Record something on your Christmas morning and they'll have it waiting on theirs. Prices are shown in pounds as a guide; you pay in Australian dollars and your bank converts at checkout. For more ideas by person, see our Christmas gifts for family in Australia from the UK.
Build your own
Start with an empty box. Fill it with them.
Choose every piece from the UK, pick a print that feels like them, then add your letter with a photo or video behind the QR card. We hand-pack it in Sydney and deliver it in Australia.
- You choose every piece, and the print on the lid
- Your letter, plus a free photo or video behind the QR card
- Built from the UK, hand-packed in Sydney, delivered in Australia only
Questions people ask
Is Christmas on 25 December in Australia?
Yes. Australia celebrates Christmas Day on 25 December, the same date as the UK, and Boxing Day on the 26th is a public holiday too. The difference is the season: it's the middle of the Australian summer.
How do Australians celebrate Christmas Day?
Much like the UK in the morning, with presents and family. Then lunch is the main meal, often prawns, seafood, cold ham and salads with pavlova, eaten outside, followed by backyard cricket, a swim or a nap.
Why do some Australians celebrate Christmas in July?
Because 25 December falls in summer, some Australians hold a second, wintry Christmas in July with a hot roast and mulled wine. It's an extra celebration, not a replacement: the real Christmas Day is still 25 December.
What does an Australian Santa look like?
He keeps the beard and the hat but is often shown in boardshorts and thongs (flip-flops), sometimes with an Akubra hat. Some songs and picture books give him kangaroos instead of reindeer, though most children still say it's reindeer.
What time is it in Sydney on Christmas Day in the UK?
Sydney is 11 hours ahead of the UK in December. So 8am on Christmas morning in the UK is 7pm on Christmas evening in Sydney, and 8pm on Christmas Eve in the UK is 7am on Christmas morning there. Perth is 8 hours ahead.
What is the last day to order a Christmas gift to Australia from the UK?
For Same Skies boxes, order by Tuesday 15 December 2026 for NSW, ACT, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, Monday 14 December for WA, and Thursday 10 December for the NT and regional or remote areas. Each cut-off is 11:59pm Sydney time, 12:59pm UK time.
What do Australians eat for Christmas dinner?
Usually lunch rather than dinner. Prawns and other seafood, cold ham, salads and pavlova are the classics, with roast turkey and pudding on plenty of tables too. Many families add dishes from their own background, and 27.6% of people in Australia were born overseas (2021 Census).
What is Australian Christmas music?
Mostly the usual carols, sung in summer, plus some written to sound Australian. The best known are the Australian Christmas carols with words by John Wheeler and music by William G. James, first published in 1948, including Carol of the Birds. Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne began in 1938.
Get something under their tree
Order from the UK by Tuesday 15 December (12:59pm UK time) for most of Australia. We pack it in Sydney and Australia Post takes it to their door. See how to send a gift to Australia from the UK.
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