The opening scene in Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It has our heroine distressing supermarket mince pies with a rolling pin in the hope that other parents at the school carol concert will presume them home-made. I loved her for that, just as I did the Calendar Girl who wins the cake competition with an M&S sponge. It’s years since I made a mince pie. And a fair few since I boned the turkey, stuffed it with ham and chestnuts and got up at dawn to set the pudding boiling.
For donkey’s years I did all that, and pressganged friends and family into hanging the Christmas tree with Quality Street sweets lovingly threaded with cotton; decorating every inch of the house with garlands of greenery from the garden; stringing the cherry tree in the drive with hundreds of light-polluting bulbs; and carol-singing with the neighbours. I even marshalled live donkeys and livelier children into nativity plays, and enjoyed it all quite as much as the children did.
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Not now, though. I’m in that widow-but-not-yet-Granny trough. Too late to escape with loved one and guilty pleasure to a non-Christian country like Morocco and so avoid ‘Jingle Bells’ in the lift and the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ on the help-line. Too early for a new generation of eager little faces shouting up the chimney that they’ve changed their minds and would rather have a trampoline.
It took me a while to grasp the fact that my friends haven’t come to my house primarily to eat — or to award me Michelin stars, or to cluck at the murkiness of my consommé — but rather, I hope, to see me. And if they haven’t, they don’t deserve feeding at all.
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