Creating an ideal Christmas cheese board

Dec 23 2025

Christmas is a time of great indulgence and where you have a special right to enjoy the good things in life, and in large measures. Cheese fits very neatly into this equation, even if you should be enjoying cheese all year round and shouldn’t require a special excuse to put a cheeseboard together. But as the festive season beckons we are positively encouraged to gorge ourselves on the finest delicacies available and so putting a French cheeseboard together at Christmas is a treat you should definitely allow yourself.
A Christmas cheeseboard for someone with a taste for fine cheese is a huge responsibility, but also an opportunity to impress people with your knowledge and to pass on some of your wisdom and your refined tastes. So here we have put some tips together to help you decorate the festive season with a Christmas cheeseboard, which can embellish the holiday period and ensure there is always quality nibbles available on the kitchen table when family and friends visit.

The rules of a Christmas cheeseboard

Choose an odd number of cheeses – Don’t ask why it’s just the rule. Three might seem too limited and seven might seem too many, so five is usually the sweet spot.
Pick a varied selection of styles – You should offer a good variation of cheese styles, which demonstrates the breadth of your knowledge but also gives people plenty of options. So choose a soft cheese, a hard cheese, a blue cheese and a smelly cheese, for example, and then maybe choose something leftfield with a distinctive character. This ensures you offer the classic styles, something for specialist cheese lovers and something everybody will like. Where possible you should also offer a good range of flavour profiles, ie. mild, medium and strong.
Accompaniments – The French don’t tend to use crackers, but offer them by all means. You could consider some crusty bread, but you should definitely find the best types of nuts and fruit to accompany the cheeses you have chosen. Pickles and chutneys always go down well and everyone has lots of those in the cupboard at Christmas. You should also ensure there is a separate knife for each type of cheese, don’t mix knives as this carries flavour over between cheeses and interferes with the taste experience.
Decoration – Make it festive by decorating your cheese board with some fake holly, decorative Santas or even a little bit of tinsel.
Presentation – Take the cheese out of its original packaging and let it breathe. It should be removed from the fridge at least half an hour before serving in order to properly release the aroma and flavours. Offering cold cheese is a huge faux pas. You can cover the cheeseboard over when people leave and make sure the cheese is preserved for the next day. At this stage you can put each cheese back in its packaging to keep it fresh.
Knowledge – Use the occasion to demonstrate your cheese knowledge. Explain what each cheese is, how it tastes and what it should be accompanied with. People will appreciate it.

A popular Christmas cheeseboard using our range of French cheeses at Sodiaal could include a crowd-pleasing hard cheese such as Comte, a popular soft cheese such as Brie de Meaux, a strong Blue cheese such as Roquefort, a strong-smelling cheese such as Munster and a cheese with great character, such as Morbier with its middle layer of ash. You can order all these cheeses from Sodiaal, so check out our range and start planning your festive cheeseboard today.