Christmas

It feels like the 57th day of January. Last week the coldest temperature of the winter so far (-12.5°C) was recorded about 20 miles west of my house. And according to every newspaper and social media feed I have scanned since new year, I should be purging my body of toxins by eating ‘plant-based meals’, abstaining from alcohol or otherwise giving up any semblance of comfort and joy. But there is another way. This may be ‘the worst time of the year… the very dead of winter’, as T.S. Eliot described the season in ‘Journey of the Magi’, but we are still in Christmastide – right up until 2 February, or Candlemas.   Twelfth Night used to be about fun and misrule, incorporating elements of the Romans’ midwinter festival Saturnalia.

Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no trains run. HS2 makes me angry. But I’ve spent every festive period of my adult life feeling positively dyspeptic about the meek acceptance with which we tolerate the almost complete lack of trains departing or arriving at any UK railway stations on Boxing Day. We are an absolute, solitary outlier in this regard. Even in Italy, where Christmas stretches lazily from Christmas Eve until Epiphany, there’s a skeleton timetable on 26 December.

On Christmas morning, as you make your first tea or begin mixing your eggnog, spare a thought for our armed forces. Since the 1890s, they have been starting Christmas Day with a drink that sounds more like a bizarre hangover cure than a festive pick-me-up.  Known as ‘Gunfire’, the drink is made of one part rum to three parts black tea. By tradition, the beverage is taken hot and is served by senior officers to junior soldiers, making it one of the few occasions in which the ordinarily inflexible roles of the military are reversed.  Although no one is quite sure how Gunfire got its name, the most compelling theory, according to the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum, comes from an encyclopaedia compiled by Major R.D. Ambrose.

The first thing I should tell you about my relationship with Christmas is that I’m not saturated in essence of humbug. My approach to a big family Christmas is the same as my relationship with Mexican food: if it’s put in front of me I’ll enjoy it, but I probably wouldn’t ever purposely seek it out for myself. With no family to speak of within 200 miles and with a fiancée who usually has to work on Christmas Day at her job as an NHS intensive care unit nurse, I’ve spent quite a few recent Christmas Days on my own in London. On the first year in particular, I admit I did slouch around the house with a face like a farrier’s anvil.

At the end of the 1970s, when I had my first taste of wine, the choice was limited. It was either cloyingly sweet German Liebfraumilch, or something from the Don Cortez or Hirondelle types, both of which were sour and brash. That, younger readers, was how bad things were, and why many of us during that time stuck to lager and lime. When Le Piat D’Or came on the market, it was, frankly, a relief. But things have changed, including my palate. Sweet or semi-sweet wines can be delicious, and bear no resemblance to the cheap German variety of my youth. Many moons ago, invited to my first posh dinner party, I was bowled over when served a lightly sweet Riesling with a fruit crumble. Riesling is a key component in Liebfraumilch, but not all Liebfraumilch is Riesling.

The algorithm got me in the end. It began with recipe content, and once I was hooked on food influencer videos, I began to be pummelled with adverts for attractive pots and pans, then clothes, and from there an ever-widening vista of objets and objects by turns pretty or useful and occasionally both. The result, apart from frittering away a certain amount of money on non-essential cardigans and kitchen gadgets, has been the development of a ruthless taste and approach to e-commerce. I want to have, and want to give, nice things, and increasingly I know where to get them. I am also hopelessly disorganised, a snob and far from awash in cash. If you’re anything like me and have yet to get your gifts sorted out, read on.

Sometime in mid-October, my husband and I begin our annual deliberation: should we host a village Christmas drinks party? The conversation is almost invariably instigated by my charming husband who, mindful of all the invitations we have shamefully yet to reciprocate, feels that we ‘ought to do it this year, at least’. Almost invariably, I am the voice of dissent.  The arguments I give against are motivated by two competing – but not entirely dissimilar – emotions: vanity and concern. Vanity because I worry that my house is neither big enough nor grand enough for the sort of event I have in mind (think something along the lines of a reception at St James’s Palace, complete with hot and cold running staff and Old Masters jammed on to every wall).