Grace Dent: Blessings be upon those who make sure the fridge is stocked with mini-quiches

There's not a huge amount of Christ in the modern British Christmas. Instead, we spend five or six days solid worshipping the fabulousness of food. Not merely during the tarted-up turkey roast on the 25th, but in a myriad sweet things, snack treats and condiment smearings, without which the festive season would be distinctly lacking in oomph. Here, God is in the details.

Ah, the comforting, traditional rustle of a Quality Street tin being passed along the Dent family sofa. The timeworn tensions over the unfair dispersal of the green noisette triangles. The bottle of Irish cream liqueur which no one admits to liking, yet by Boxing Day will be drained dry, in triple measures, and added to restorative cups of instant coffee.

The large jar of full-fat mayonnaise slathered on to a 10am turkey and Paxo stuffing sandwich. The one that tastes so much better than actual, proper Christmas lunch because it's eaten standing up, alone, in your bobbly cardigan and pyjama bottoms, with a TV planner in one hand. Also: supermarket pre-packed smoked salmon to scatter over scrambled eggs, because, well, it's Christmas, so all meals must have some showbiz sparkle and pizzazz. I'm not sure why smoked salmon does this. It just does.

And God forbid that someone in my house fancies a humble handful of KP nuts with a G&T on Christmas Eve, while paruppa-pum-pumming along to Carols from King's, only to realise that nobody visited the nut aisle in Asda. And then – worse still – it turns out that the gin on the booze trolley is, on closer inspection, a dusty bottle of grappa.

This is simply the opposite of Christmas. If this happens, I have failed. There must be gin, and there must also be Scotch, and even a bottle of Malibu, which I've drunk every Christmas since 1988, and have no intention of stopping. Someone suggested that – in the light of my lofty restaurant-critic status – I upgrade this to a bottle of Koko Kanu. I say, if Christmas isn't broken, don't try to fix it. Same, too, for fancy-shmancy mince pies made by boutique bakeries and laced with chocolate chips and edible gold-leaf. Nonsense. Shove some Mr Kiplings in the oven.

Mince pies, incidentally, have no place during the actual week of Christmas. They should have been consumed with such vigour during early December – at one's desk, in one's car or as a rudimentary hangover breakfast – that the very sight of one by December the 20th should make you bilious. A good way to detect whether anyone at your Christmas Day get-together is actually an alien species going through the motions of how they believe humans behave is to float the notion of warm mince pies, and then see who is enthusiastic.

All this Christmas piggery doesn't happen by magic. It takes intense planning. Right now, Britain is full of people who are micro-scheduling the collection of a fresh goose on the 23rd, followed by a 75-mile detour to Suffolk to collect potted shrimp, and then an 85mph scramble in order to liaise with an 11pm Tesco delivery slot at a holiday cottage down a pitch-dark country lane. Let's call these folk the “doers”.

The doers are the backbone of Christmas. Over the holiday season, every plate that makes its way from fridge to sofa laden with pork pie and pickled onions, each pop of a Prosecco bottle, and every hungover buttery bacon sandwich, can be attributed to the doers of this land.

Each yuletide gathering has one or two intense, dedicated, list-making, waiting-in-an-NCP-car-park-at-7am-to-buy-last-minute-sausage-meat doers. This is vital work since several Christmas guests will fall into the category the “do frig-alls”. I'd call this sub-group something much stronger but this is the run-up to Christmas. The little baby Jesus did not shiver in a manger for me to litter my column with profanities, even if they would perfectly describe the sort of Christmas guest who turns up on the 24th without so much as a box of orange-flavoured Matchmakers or a bottle of port – nor so much as puts a single plate in the dishwasher, nor can even be trusted to wrap a chipolata in streaky bacon without floating off midway through the task to GHD their fringe and Instagram the results.

The do-frig-alls believe – at some level – that the Christmas fridge was filled with M&S mini-quiches, sour-cream dips and sherry trifle by three passing kings on camels. Christmas doers mutter about this sort of thing every day during December, while all the time secretly relishing every minute of the forward planning that the month demands because it makes them feel stalwart, capable and a yuletide linchpin.

Doers are like Jesus: they suffer for the good of mankind. They are the shining stars of Christmas. Without their “To-Do” lists and their festive passive-aggressive angst, admit it: the whole thing would be a right old turkey.