Happy Holidays

An article for Ruby Lane:

I envy the Americans their Thanksgiving. Over here in the UK, of course,we don't celebrate it.

To me it represents most of what is good about Christmas, or Christmas as it used to be. Families gather for a day and eat together. There is no gift-giving and, with the possible exception of the best recipe for cranberry sauce, no competitiveness. It's a harvest festival that is celebrated by city dwellers as well as the people of the countryside, because each in their way creates their own harvest. It's a good, wholesome, old-fashioned celebration of the importance of families and togetherness, of sitting down together in peace.

Moreover, the original Thanksgiving was a multicultural feast, with the settlers enjoying the fruits of the harvest their Native American neighbours had helped them to produce.

Over here we have to wait another month for our turkey, to accompany which we have now imported the cranberry sauce. Even the turkey, for us, is a relatively recent addition, the traditional dish up to the time of the Victorians being roast goose. I did roast a goose one Christmas. It's expensive, as they aren't intensively reared like most turkeys. You get a lot of fat, which is excellent for roasting the accompanying potatoes, and relatively little meat, which is all 'brown' meat (like the turkey leg) and fairly chewy. However, compared with the average turkey, it had lots of flavour.

On this side of the Atlantic we have generally resisted the expression 'Happy Holidays', with its intention of encompassing all cultures and faiths. Instead, we tend to acknowledge the different festivals individually. School children of all ethnic origins will make lanterns to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, and I clearly remember driving into Rochdale, where my Dad lives, and which is nowadays very culturally mixed, and seeing a huge banner on the Town Hall that read 'Happy Eid' - Eid being the Muslim festival at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Among these festivals, Christmas takes its own place.

So how do we celebrate Christmas over here? You would probably get a slightly different answer from every family you asked.

In my childhood, when we were still recovering from the deprivations of World War II and many things were still rationed, the celebrations were fairly basic, but precious to me. Firstly, we didn't have a turkey. We had a chicken, which was expensive and tasty, not the battery farmed product we mainly encounter today. To supplement this we normally also had a joint of pork. Maybe that's a tradition I should revive. The traditional sage and onion stuffing goes equally well with both.

On Christmas Eve I would put out a mince pie and a glass of sherry for Father Christmas (not Santa Claus) and maybe a carrot for the reindeer. He always visited and he always ate the mince pie :) My Christmas stocking (oh, I can still recall the excitement) had at its toe, as tradition demanded, an apple, an orange and a new penny coin. There would be a few small toys to keep me occupied in the hours between when I spotted the stocking and an acceptable hour for waking my parents. There might be gold-wrapped chocolate 'coins' but sweets were still rationed in those early years so they were treasured. I still recall the excitement of seeing a hammer sticking out of the top of the stocking. I had wanted a hammer (I was a bit of a tomboy). It was an elegant pin hammer which I suspect my Dad had already used for hanging the decorations. I still have it, and use it for hanging pictures.

My parents were both from large families, but somehow both grandmothers always came to us. I don't remember much church-going in those early years, though when I was a teenager we would go at midnight, then come home to coffee with rum in it and hot mince pies. Christmas morning was devoted to unwrapping presents, many home-made, and then to the smells of cooking and my mother fretting in the kitchen. Dad would go to collect the grandmothers, then we would sit down to our feast.

The culmination of the feast was of course the Christmas Pudding. A couple of years ago I sent a very small Christmas Pudding to an American friend. “OMG”, she said, “Do you know how many calories there are in that small thing???” She fantasised about keeping one in the glove compartment of her car in case of emergencies. “Woman survives a week in a ditch on one Christmas Pudding”.

After the meal, we would switch on the “wireless”, now of course known as the radio, and listen to the King's Speech, and, when we had a new monarch, the Queen's Speech. For many years now this has been televised and can no doubt be accessed online, but I suspect that many families still time their meals to coincide with the Speech.

I have been indulging in nostalgia, but this time of year is one for looking back. However or whatever you celebrate, I hope your memories and your Holidays will be happy.