Christmas

Thursday

Theresa May

Theresa May’s recipe for Christmas cake

This recipe was given to me years ago by an old friend — hence the imperial measurements — and I have been making it ever since. Sadly, since my diabetes, I can’t really eat it any longer although I still make it for my husband and for friends (although not this year, I’m afraid, due to the limit on how many people we can see). While the recipe is for the cake itself, I recommend covering with marzipan and icing. What you’ll need3lb mixed dried fruit4oz glace cherries8fl oz rum8oz butter8oz plain flour8oz soft brown sugar5 medium eggs, separated5fl oz clear honey What to do 1. Soak dried fruit in rum overnight2. Set oven to 170°C3. Cream butter and sugar, then add egg yolks one at a time with a spoonful of sugar with each egg4.

Justin Welby

How to find hope in a year filled with despair

This year we might sing the words ‘Tidings of comfort and joy’ to one another with poignancy. ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ differs from many other well-loved Christmas carols in one respect: despite being a hopeful song, it’s written in a minor key. There is a sense of melancholy, perhaps a touch of darkness; a feeling that not all is sweetness and light. It holds together the tension of joy and sorrow. How do we explain the comfort and joy of Jesus Christ in a year when things aren’t comfortable and they definitely haven’t been joyful? We have an image of Christmas — idyllic, pretty, like the front of a Christmas card. We have our expectations of an ideal holiday.

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: The politics of Christmas trees

To say that the past nine months have been tough is like saying a hurricane felt like a spring shower. For many people it must have been utter hell, particularly those who own hospitality businesses. I simply cannot imagine how they could plan and manage ahead when our government refused to give anyone a clue whether either of the lockdowns was genuinely going to end. It all reminds me of the silly children’s game Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which players attempt to creep up behind ‘Grandmother’. If she turns and catches them moving, they must return to the beginning. We always seem to be returning to the beginning. Lockdown all over again. Except the rules of Grandmother’s Footsteps are at least clear.

Mick Fleetwood

Mick Fleetwood: Why Peter Green was the greatest guitarist

In a normal week, I would jam with local musicians, but that stopped in March and we musicians miss the road and our crews. There have been some good things to come out of this awful year, though. A new world was revealed to me on TikTok, an app that lets people upload clips of themselves lip-syncing or dancing. And out of TikTok came Nathan Apodaca, a man from Idaho who recorded a video of himself skateboarding to work while sipping from a bottle of cranberry juice and singing along to our song ‘Dreams’. More than 70 million people have watched Nathan’s video, and we have since spoken and he is the sweetest man. A lot of people out there are struggling, and Nathan’s ‘Dreams’ video is a great celebration of joyfulness and being in the moment.

Ian Rankin

I Live Here Now: a short story by Ian Rankin

Ever since his daughter’s death, John Bates had all but given up. Eunice had been 17, bubbly and surrounded by friends, keen to leave school behind to study history at university. She’d been a passionate cook and hockey player, not yet ready for a steady boyfriend, and loved absolutely by both her parents. But then one night she had consumed almost an entire bottle of vodka before climbing on to a parapet and leaping into a river swollen by over a week of near-constant rain. John and his wife Emily had sat numbed for days on end as relatives and neighbours passed through the house, offering solace and paying tribute. Now, six months on, Emily was back at work at the florist’s, increasingly busy as Christmas approached.

Tom Holland

The anxieties that long ago shadowed Christmas are back

Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own. It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots.

Susan Hill

The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun. Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys. Home was Scarborough: the bracing sea air and howling gales where I missed the coal dust smell, though it brought back the cough I had had since nearly dying of whooping cough, aged two — the cough that has never really left me, so that many a Christmas since has smelled of Vicks, camphor, Friars’ Balsam.

Lloyd Evans

Deserves to be a permanent winter fixture: Potted Panto at the Garrick reviewed

Potted Panto is a 70-minute parody presented by two burlesque comedians. Jeff is a tall, playful bungler and his colleague, Dan, is a squat, dour authoritarian who likes to see everything done efficiently. They leap on stage and declare their plan to present a compendium of the best-known Christmas shows. ‘All six of them,’ says Dan. ‘No, all twelve,’ contradicts Jeff, unfurling a list that includes classics from the TV schedules like A Christmas Carol and Das Boot. He insists that these non-pantos are included in their panto rundown. And so a war of opposites begins. Jeff is all appetite and instinct while Dan stands for reason and method. Or, in shorthand, Jeff is an infant and Dan is an adult.

James Walton

A romcom with very little com: BBC1’s Black Narcissus reviewed

In Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, five nuns set off for a remote Himalayan palace in 1934 to set up a convent school. The palace, donated by an Anglophile general, used to be a harem and was still adorned with erotic paintings. It was also where the general’s sister, Srimati, had committed suicide and where, just a few months previously, a male religious order had tried to establish a school too, before retiring defeated for mysteriously undisclosed reasons. The nuns’ main helper in practical matters, a British expat called Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola), possessed an overwhelming maleness that expressed itself through such attributes as a chiselled jaw, an Indiana Jones hat and a handy way with a spanner. So what could possibly go wrong?

Daisy Dunn

The grumpy genius of Raymond Briggs

Raymond Briggs has often spoken of his annoyance at being associated with Christmas. His Snowman may fly across our screens each Christmas day, but in the book there is no Father Christmas, no sleigh, and certainly no figgy pud. The North Pole scene featuring the jolly elf was written into the story for John Coates’s TV adaptation in 1982 and struck Briggs as rather mawkish at the time. As readers and viewers of Father Christmas know, Briggs’s Papa Noël is anyway rather a grouch at this time of year. As if the cold isn’t enough for him to contend with, there are the chimneys, the tasteless presents, and, oh yes, ‘blooming Christmas’ itself.

Laura Freeman

Every page of this astonishingly beautiful ode to the citrus is a treat

There’s an episode of Yes Minister called ‘Equal Opportunities’. Minister Jim Hacker is under pressure to recruit more women to the civil service. The hunt is on for female mandarins. ‘Ah,’ says principal private secretary Bernard. ‘Sort of… satsumas?’ At this time of year, I can’t help thinking of Bernard as I hover in the Co-op over nets of tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas and ‘easy peelers’, whatever they are. ’Tis the season for citrus. For oranges at the bottom of stockings, for Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning, for smoked salmon blinis with slices of lemon, for Milanese panettone with candied parings of peel, and for J.C.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s Christmas Covid gamble

Boris Johnson is taking a gamble with his decision to stick with the easing of Covid restrictions for Christmas. The gamble is that people will suddenly start adhering to government guidance and severely restrict their contact with their families, even though the law does not force them to do so. Although, as the Prime Minister argued at this afternoon's press conference, the government's current level of involvement in people's lives is probably the strictest since Cromwell, it remains the case that it has repeatedly concluded this year that it has to force people to restrict their social contact, rather than ask them – whether that’s nicely or in the current special stern voice that ministers have decided to adopt.

James Forsyth

Keir Starmer’s late criticism of Christmas easing

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both assumed that today was the last PMQs before Christmas, suggesting that they don’t expect Parliament to be sitting next Wednesday. Their exchanges were particularly unenlightening this week. Starmer argued that his concerns about the tier system had been justified by the fact that cases are rising in three quarters of tier 2 areas and half of tier 3. Johnson again attacked him for abstaining on the vote on the tier system. Interestingly, Starmer set himself fully against the Christmas easing calling it ‘the next big mistake’ and approvingly quoted the joint Health Service Journal / British Medical Journal editorial, which called for a ban on household mixing at Christmas.

christmas manor
Priscilla M. Jensen

Christmas at the manor

From our US edition

Virginia  Christmas will be different this year. Our refrigerator’s death was like Socrates’s: it began at the bottom and moved gradually upward, eventually yielding up its Freon eide to the empyrean, or at least the ozone hole. Such a death in early November raises big questions about holiday-making, or would most years, with Thanksgiving upon us and Christmas not far behind. But with COVID rampant, we’re admonished to stay home, and will, which dovetails conveniently with the fact that because of the virus, supply chains are banjaxed and we won’t get our new fridge till Boxing Day. (And refrigerator boxes are the best boxes, so there’s the grandchildren’s Christmas taken care of.

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Four-nations Christmas Covid truce hangs in balance

It's become a regular refrain to hear that Brexit talks have been extended. Now the same applies to negotiations over the Christmas Covid rule relaxation. After various scientific advisers warned the UK government against going ahead with its planned five day relaxation of the rules (which would see three household permitted to gather together), representatives for the four nations discussed the policy on a call this evening. The result? No decision as of yet. As things stand, there has been no agreed change to the rules. Instead one source on the call tells the BBC:  'There was broad recognition commitment has been made to people and they will expect us to honour it – but there is a need to be stronger and clearer in guidance and messaging'.

Isabel Hardman

Starmer piles on pressure over the Covid Christmas amnesty

Sir Keir Starmer has called on Boris Johnson to hold an emergency Cobra meeting, arguing that the current plans to ease coronavirus restrictions over Christmas should be reviewed. The Labour leader said this afternoon that his party would support the government if it decides that tougher measures are needed. He stops short of calling for the Christmas easing to be cancelled, presumably because he'd rather not be the political grinch in this case. But he is still pushing Johnson. In a letter to the Prime Minister, Starmer argues that the current tier system has not been working and that the government cannot ignore the rising cases.

Friday

Olivia Potts

Brandy snaps: the festive lift we all need

From our US edition

I’m not sure what it is about brandy snaps that have placed them so firmly in the Christmas culinary tradition: this simple biscuit lacks the dried fruits and nuts of other yuletide stalwarts, its spicing is minimal, and its shelf life is fleeting compared to the cakes and puddings that require festive forethought months in advance. But whatever the reason, I can’t imagine making or eating brandy snaps at any other time of the year. In fairness, my brandy bottle is rarely used other than in the lead up to Christmas — when it gets sloshed into every cake and bake that stands still for long enough — but the brandy in the name is misleading.

brandy snaps

Sunday

Marlo Safi

Ten Christmas gifts for an adventurous eater

From our US edition

Being a citizen of the world is difficult when you’re not allowed to enter the rest of it, much less travel across state lines without excessive burden. The ‘bad thing’ has made eating adventurously a tad harder. Some of us are meat-and-potato people. Others of us will unflinchingly and unknowingly order gizzard served in the basement of a Nepali restaurant in Queens because, as they say, when in Rome.Although I’ve been unable to travel or eat at restaurants, my enduring love affair with my stomach has not taken a hiatus. With Christmas fast approaching, neither should yours, or that of the citizen-of-the-world you love.These are items I’ve used or eaten, or that are also on my wish list, most of which are under $50. Bon appétit (and joyeux Noël).

christmas adventurous eater

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Was endorsing Boris one of my worst misjudgments ever?

Now that our social lives are a Venn diagram that only mathematicians can understand I am officially becoming a recluse. I’ve been getting to this point for years, but since the latest Covid rules mean that what we can and can’t do until ‘vaccine freedom day’ can only be understood if you have a head for shaded charts, I am resigning from polite society, in so far as I was ever in it. Boris may as well have announced 375 tiers and a rule saying anyone who wants to celebrate Christmas needs to sit inside an actual bubble and roll themselves along the floor. I have no idea what the government is on about any more.

Monday

Amber Duke

Melania’s au revoir to Christmas

From our US edition

Washington DC It’s still dark outside and dumping rain as the media waits for the annual White House Holiday Decor preview. The weather’s not as cold as last year and there isn’t the same cinnamon-sugar smell of cookies wafting from the East Room basement but it’s still enough to prompt complaints from members of the press. I am kind of enjoying it. I know that it’s probably one of the last times the Trump family can subject the media to some misery while still in office. This year’s Christmas decorations will probably be more contentious than ever thanks to that leaked audio recording of Melania questioning ‘who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff?