Green and Red Food Ideas for Christmas

Does your Christmas have a colour scheme? When it comes to our Christmas tree and decorations, we've always been one for a glorious jumble of bits and pieces collected by us over the years, made by our children and received as gifts from family and friends.  Our Christmas colour theme is best described as 'eclectic rainbow' and I expect that that will be the case for all our Christmases to come too! When I think of Christmas colours, I do instantly think of red and green though - holly, Santa, elves, candy canes, robins, Christmas trees and Brussels sprouts are just a few of the things that spring to mind! I thought it would be a fun exercise therefore to think up some healthy green and red foods to use this festive season - for themed children's lunch boxes, snacks, meals at home and even Christmas party food - I love the idea of theming a Christmas party on a colour scheme!

Below I'm sharing some of my ideas - I really enjoyed creating the foods for this post and my boys thoroughly enjoyed eating the results!

First up some green and red vegetable ideas! Pictured below are sugar snap peas, tomatoes, broccoli, peas, beetroot, cucumber and red pepper.

Other green and red vegetables you could use include spinach, lettuce, celery, avocado, mange tout, fine green beans, runner beans, green pepper, spring onion, Brussels sprouts, radish, red onion and red cabbage (we love pickled red cabbage at this time of year!).

Now for some green and red fruits. Pictured below are kiwi fruit, passion fruit, red and green grapes, strawberries, raspberries, apple and melon.

Other green and red fruits you could use include dried or fresh cherries, cranberries, redcurrants, watermelon, blood orange, plum, pear and lime.

Once you've got your red and green foods together, the next step is finding fun ways to present them. My first idea is an extremely simple one - Melon Christmas tree skewers.  To make, simply cut a slice of melon into triangles and skewer them onto plastic skewers.  The star skewers I used were perfect for this, but any skewers would work.

Next I made a special red and green Christmas fruit salad. This included melon triangles, kiwi triangles, halved red and green grapes, raspberries and some pomegranate seeds. You could use any mixture of green and red fruits though - even throwing in some dried fruit like cranberries (perfect for the festive season!).

This Christmas tree snack isn't a new idea - I've seen variations of this floating around Pinterest for the last few years, but I put my own spin on it with sugar snap peas, a carrot star, a red pepper trunk and pomegranate seeds, which I thought made really pretty tree lights!

I used green grapes and raspberries to make Christmas themed fruit kebabs - the skewers I used for these were some glittery plastic cocktail skewers that I've had knocking around in my cupboard for years - always nice to repurpose things from my pre-children life! As with the red and green fruit salad, any combination of fruits would work well for these.  These were a big hit with both of my boys, and I think they'd go down really well as a healthy option at a Christmas party!

Finally I made myself a festive salad for lunch, all in reds and greens! Included in the salad was shredded lettuce, chopped raw red pepper, quartered cherry tomatoes, halved red grapes, finely sliced spring onion and dried cranberries.  I topped the salad with Christmas trees and stars, which I cut from slices of cucumber using mini bento cutters.

This was a fun little project to work on! Do you have a colour theme in your house at Christmas?

Grace