It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense festive angst.
The mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress
Samuel Johnson was talking about second marriages when hatching his aphorism about hope over experience, rather than what Americans refer to as ‘readying the home’, yet every year I still try to summon those seasonal spirits of childhood. My efforts border on the authoritarian, kicking off in a prescriptive fashion as Advent starts. I blame my mother – and not just because it’ll save in therapy fees later. She was wilfully resistant to my young self’s seasonal yearnings, postponing buying a tree until about a week before the big day, and then returning with something that was only my height. I’d been to the Royal Opera House; I’d seen The Nutcracker. The tree was meant to instil awe not elicit a shrug. She once even made me re-use the previous year’s Advent calendar. The deprivation was real.
Now my own festive routine is enshrined, at no small cost to the mental wellbeing of myself, my husband and our daughters. On 1 December, breakfast is eaten off our Christmas plates, accompanied by Carols from King’s at plaster-cracking volume. I stand over the girls as they open the first door of their vastly overpriced, overwhelmingly tasteful and disappointingly chocolate-free German Advent calendars. Before I go to work, I buy the tree. The biggest, fattest tree our London terrace can accommodate. (The man I’ve bought it from for the last 15 years knows my house well enough to be able to rein in any delusions I have about property proportions; last year he was right that 14ft was too tall.) I then decorate it in an obsessive fashion with my carefully curated decorations (German and paper mâché since you ask).
But before 1 December, a mince pie won’t pass my lips (requiring Herculean restraint on my part). The only seasonal preparation I’ll countenance comes on the last Sunday before Advent which is Stir-Up Sunday; so named because the opening line to the Collect for that day in the Anglican 1549 Book of Common Prayer reads, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.’ Round ours the mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress before the first bars of Bublé hit the airways.
Stir Up Tension and Marital Disunity Sunday is undoubtedly born of my intransigence. For in the face of my husband’s steadfast opposition, I’ve been making a batch of at least half a dozen Christmas puddings for friends and family for the best part of 20 years. My husband protests that it’d be cheaper to courier Fortnum & Mason’s finest across the country. I reason that part of his resistance comes from the fact he doesn’t like Christmas pudding, so it’s reasonable to ignore him because he’s got a seasonal screw loose. (My girls don’t like it either, but that genetic anomaly is their father’s fault, so I forgive them.)
I think I feel compelled to rustle up my fruity mounds as part of my festive rebellion against my mother’s restrained approach. I’d like to pretend that I use a recipe that has been carefully preserved in the pages of some trusted culinary bible, and passed down through the generations, but that would be a gross deception. My mother would simply head to Fortnum’s for ours, reasoning that if one spent four times what it cost at Waitrose, all manner of things would be well. So I’m pre-disposed to overspend when it comes to my puddings, but I splurge on the ingredients instead. I use quince instead of cooking apples, rum instead of brandy, the quotidian dried fruit is bolstered by dried figs, dried apricots and dried prunes, and the perversion which is candied peel is very definitely out.
So the angst in our household is already running high by 1 December. All that’s left to do is argue about which grandparents’ turn it is, the merits of Christmas lunch versus Christmas dinner, and why, despite knowing I always make one, my mother-in-law insists on buying a Tesco’s Finest Christmas pudding. By which time, any seasonal spirit has shrivelled like a supermarket sprout left languishing in the furthest reaches of a fridge drawer until mid-January.
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