You know how it goes – someone, somewhere, buys the Italian cake, from where it embarks on a long circumnavigation of various friends and family
A normal Christmas is predicted, and thanks to this the ritual police are now on patrol. I’m not complaining; I include myself among their number. Loading the freezer with sausage rolls for the party I plan to throw on Boxing Day, I enjoy the soothing embrace of order and repetition, the feeling that all is temporarily right with the world. Very little currently gives me more pleasure than the sound of my small niece talking me through her idea of a proper Christmas. “We have beef, not turkey,” she says, in a voice that is straight out of Barchester Towers (I play a supplicant Mrs Proudie to her austere Archdeacon Grantly).
It’s strange to think both of how little Christmas has changed in my lifetime and how much. In 2022, I struggle to explain to the young ones that as children my brother and I used to be given edible smoking sets by our granny: a chocolate pipe, cigar and cigarettes alluringly arranged on a moulded, plastic tray. The expressions on their faces insist I’m bonkers. Yet there will surely never be a Christmas at the end of which someone isn’t left looking at a hill of strawberry Quality Street; the Brexit deal does not exist that will fix this particular surplus. Some rituals, admittedly, take a while to get established. But thereafter, they cling like ivy. In the 1980s, my family began going out to an Indian restaurant on Christmas Eve, with the result that this day is now unimaginable without poppadoms. Suggest fish and chips, and there will be blood, not tomato ketchup.
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