Home life
Seasonal gloom
Alice Thomas Ellis
The prospect of Christmas is really getting me down now. Should we stay in London or go the country? Beef or turkey? What do men want in the way of Christmas presents? How does one stay sufficiently sober in order to remember to make the gravy? How can I dissuade the daughter from making peppermint fondants when I want the table free for chopping onions? Will I have enough bin liners to contain the blasted wrapping paper? Will the children settle for a small rather than a forest giant Christmas tree? I hate Christmas trees — nasty, vulgar, Victorian, German things. I would much rather have holly and ivy and a Yule log except that the grate is designed only for coal which I have neglected to order because the coal hole is open to the elements, and Cadders and Puss, not to mention all the neighbourhood mogs, regard coal as cat litter. The smell of scorching cat pee cannot be compared with the smell of burning apple wood.
Worrying about the Christmas comesti- bles is clearly driving me mad. I dreamed the other night that I made a first course of pin-wheel sandwiches stuffed wth cream cheese and chopped olives — something I have never done in my life. I used to be able to con the kids into believing they were having a party by making triangular rather than square sandwiches, but further than that I would not go; and nowadays they are not so easily fooled, demanding elegant fripperies like pastry boats filled with caviar or little bowls of shellfish with creamy sauces on it. I suppose it's my own fault. One year I idly suggested that it might be nice to dress for Christmas dinner and now it has become traditional. Dinner jackets and lacy gowns seem somehow to demand a formal repast, ending with Stil- ton and port, rather than a mere faintly up-market Sunday lunch. This is all very fine and large for those standing and sitting around sipping Buck's Fizz, but the person whose lot it is to haul the joint out of the oven can get very upset when she spills boiling dripping down the skirt of her velvet frock. • Another aspect of worrying about, Christmas dinner is that one forgets to worry about all the dinners which have to be prepared in the meantime. Despairing groans go up of 'What the hell do people eat on Wednesdays?' and the mind goes blank. We can only think of things like shepherd's pie and fish-fingers and lamb hotpot. Looking in a 19th edition of The Girls' Own Annual, I find an article on seasonable cooking for November, sug- gesting geese, hares and rabbits. No one here is too keen on goose; hares are right out because our place in Wales is sacred to the creatures, being the erstwhile abode of one Melangell, their patron saint, and nothing would persuade me to offend her. (She had a nunnery there in the year dot and one day 'a certain Elys' came along with the intention of violating the com- munity. The legend says he died there in a 'most horrible manner'. Not a lady to cross unnecessarily.) That leaves rabbits which Janet is sentimental about, and anyway ever since the fourth son remarked that eating bunnies is rather on a par with eating budgerigars, I have had similar reservations. Besides, the directions for preparing it are highly off-putting. They go on about skinning the beast and drawing out its entrails and end: 'I was forgetting the lungs, a soft spongy mass between the shoulders; they are removed, and help in making the gravy.' How, I wonder? Then it says, 'Stick a small skewer into the animal's mouth and fasten the head back on to the body No, I won't. Yuk. Joints of meat that resemble the living animal in- cline me even further towards vegetarian- ism. I will never forget the occasion when a French friend served up a whole sucking- pig. I was pregnant at the time and made an exhibition of myself by sobbing quietly throughout the entire evening. But then I used to weep over boiled eggs in those days because they'd been thwarted of the chance of turning into chickens. I've got to go shopping now and I'm going to look for a simulated joint made out of soya. No one will like it but I don't care. It will be Advent soon and I'm thinking of insisting that we observe the fast. How pleasantly simple it would be to serve up a mess of pottage each evening, occasional fish as a treat, because I'm not so sentimental about fish, and loads and loads of baked pota- toes.
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