Order festive food this holiday season

No need for any of us to be dreaming of sugarplums on the night before Christmas when we can imagine far more grandiose treats, from trifles to truffles, from pheasant to pistachios

All you have to do is order: perhaps a Virginia ham basket complete with peanut soup mix. Or coffee-flavored dark chocolates shaped like violins for a “virtuoso” performance, no doubt.

If your mouth is dripping with the taste of latte, wipe that smile away with a fiesta basket of Texas red grapefruit, a half-bushel of tartness right in time to make ambrosia to accompany the fruitcake. Fruitcake made from a scrumptious blend of fruits, nuts and liqueurs in a recipe imported from Germany early in the century. What century? Who knows? But we do know fruitcakes last a long time if kept in a tin.

What about a gourmet tower, very popular of late, with decorated boxes you can recycle next year after devouring the apples and cookies, the mixed nuts and assorted confections.

There is absolutely no need to get in a wad about holiday entertaining when all you have to do is order smoked turkey or pork tenderloin, or peppered ham or Canadian bacon or even tender fajitas smoked over hickory embers and sent to you along with handmade tortillas and zesty picante sauce. “Heat ’em and eat ’em,” the catalog says.

Not traditional enough? Maybe you could start with classic cheese straws and finish with lemon straws. Both look like frozen French fries but are sold only in “fine gift and gourmet stores.”

Don’t bother with Christmas morning breakfast. Order ahead a five-piece “breakfast-in-a-box” guaranteed to turn family and guests into early risers. The box includes hickory-smoked and peppered bacon, sausage, pancake mix and syrup. Sure enough, but no elves to do the cooking, so scratch that.

There’s a Swedish tea ring, “baked fresh when we receive your order … not before,” that is bursting with Oregon walnuts, raisins and cinnamon. Baked at “a small bakery in Oregon,” not Sweden at all.

There are kits for luscious creme brulee that even include mix, sugars and ceramic dishes. There are kits for “no-fail souffles,”and chocolate sticks (three flavors: chai, mocha and butterscotch) you stir into hot milk. And kits for wine and beer making “in only 30 days.”

You can order a whole 12-ounce bag of “reindeer feed” to hang on your tree before Santa’s herd flies from the north. The holiday reindeer treats are white chocolate pralines ‘n cream crunch nuggets in a festive burlap bag, irresistible to people as well as incoming deer.

For fish lovers, there’s Taku wild smoked salmon from the vast and plentiful Taku River running from the interior of British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. This wild sockeye is smoked over alderwood fires, then sprinkled with organic ground black pepper and a hint of organic garlic.

You can order juicy pears, perfect apples, grapefuit candy, chocolate-coated blueberries and peppermint candy. Just don’t order me any Portabella garden or Shitake log to grow in my kitchen. I don’t want any “rich, woodsy flavor” except right outside.