Christmas 2023

When I began to write this, on Christmas Eve morning, I should have been glueing a gingerbread house together with icing, a present for my nieces, but I am not too coherent after rising and my good-temper and good manners extends as far as refraining from speech.  My husband is up around five, bright, optimistic, productive. I am so far from being able to empathise with this that I consider such people almost another species. Some two or three hours later he regularly tries to present some issue on which he wants agreement or clarification, despite knowing from long experience he will rarely obtain it before I have had a cup of green tea followed by the delicious, creamy, properly caffeinated hit of coffee. Sometimes he just says, "Ah, you haven't had your coffee yet". Usually though, at this point I am in the throes of making teen porridge and hot packed lunches a feat, including driving them to school, I manage sometimes with no caffeine at all, though never borne of choice, only necessity. 

Writing is the one thing that will wake me up and doesn’t involve anything cold or windy in the Scottish winter. At this time of year, if it's sunny it's cold and it's only ever sunny between nine and three at most. When the temperature rises to the point where you can conceivably do something outside, it is invariably wet. One might think the siege-like cold of this single glazed old house would cause anyone to be instantly alert but rather it makes you want to burrow under the flannel bedlinen until…April? That is after all, when people don't endure the winter here come to Scotland.

I wrestle annually with Christmas, usually and, generally successfully, in the direction of downsizing although there is not much more to downsize at our end. We still have a convincing tree, though since nobody seems that bothered nowadays, it is fraudulently plastic and decorated with things the children made over the years or that we were given. I have sometimes walked the dog in those sterile Christmas tree plantations and am glad we have renounced that absurd industry.  My youngest, now 14, had his last stocking two years ago.  The boys get money for Christmas, nothing extravagant. I bought chocolate Connect 4 (what genius, M&S - with refills) to play on Christmas day morning, in lieu of stockings. I am utterly without strategy and lost four out of five times to the fourteen year old. In a fit of extravagance I bought a card game, Debatable, with an eye on upcoming exams. Christmas used to be so much more of everything: presents, food, decorations, cards, commitments. I did it all and it was exhausting.

Whenever I dropped in to pick up the odd item, the shops were insane . Although we did not host The Meal for 10 (I offered), I did the pud, Christmas Eve lunch and another meal, though I offered more.  I said however, if we did The Meal it would not be turkey. It would have been something in the slow cooker - probably lamb shanks by my husband although I would never buy the poor dead things myself. The reason we have The Meal is because my brother is profoundly, irrationally wedded to Tradition - and food. So he does it before collapsing with great huffing sighs in bed until, well, long after we have gone.

I do the washing up and escape outside which means I take the dog out, always, until this year, alone. This year my husband took the twins who took the dog and I took mum. My boys demonstrated the training that has cost me slices of my soul and my sanity and played a blinder on the washing up. I don't know what it is that eventually gets teenage boys to help out: reason, maternal anguish, routine? If I had to choose, I would say routine. If you are wondering about your failure as a mother, stick with it. I remember the lovely lady in a local shop who eventually could manage life no more say that boys come out OK at the end of it. She did not. She did a lot of caring. One of my sons has never really refused to help and the other used to as test of my mental or emotional strength or an act of rebellion perhaps. I could not quite believe it yesterday when I found he had not only done the washing up, but was doing part of his brother's job of wiping the surfaces and with a vigour the kitchen sees only in my darkest moments.

In terms of getting the boys to sit down together at table, it is still a struggle. For this, you need unity and if you and your mate enjoy personal space on the scale of the steppe or the marriage of of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson with their separate apartments at Sissinghurst, it can come as no surprise if your offspring then choose to put this into practice at mealtimes. Put another way, they only converse at table, in company and then rarely. They will talk, not just in imperatives or accusatory interrogations but in ordinary, conversational terms outside of meal times - usually afterwards. I asked the younger one why this couldn't happen at mealtimes. He grunted.

- Is it because it's contrived?, I asked.

- Yes.

- Do you know what 'contrived' means?

He did, apparently.

Perhaps it is a matter of catching the right moment with teenagers. A woman I met on a train told me having their friends over for pizza works. But I think they're worried in case I mention the B word.

If I eat carbs it is usually barley. Occasionally I inflict this on my family. I tried giving it to my 83 year old type 2 diabetic father recently. It won't spike his blood sugar in the way more simple carbohydrates will do. He cares for mum and he has just been told his brain tumour has returned.

The first thing dad said to me on Christmas Day was that I was not to tell him what he could or could not eat or drink. Dad has spend his life in obesity. He has recovered from bowel cancer, prostate cancer, and his brain tumour is back for the third time. He has started limping because he loses feeling in one leg. Dad has a strength of will and stoicism reminiscent of another time. Indeed, he comes from a different time, shown by this film of Christmas Day 1949. This will fails him, however when it comes to food and drink. Perhaps there's hope because he kicked a serious cigarette and then cigar habit over 30 years ago. I can only think it was his upbringing or something genetic we don't yet know. He insists the diabetes is under control. I didn't say it would be under control when he was no longer diabetic. I didn't mention that the chocolate mousse was made with avocados and agave which has a lower GI than other forms of sugar. I had made delicious nut clusters with superberries and 100% cacao a few days before, infinitely tastier than the sugar-packed, store-bought, crowd-pleasing carrot cake my husband had presented for dessert. I waived the cake to accompany dad in the clusters. He looked so woebegone I shaved him a sliver of cake but even when my brother pronounced the nuts better, he still sulked.

If barley wasn't good for you, I am sure the family wouldn't complain so much. It's chewy, nutty, healthy, local. Undaunted, I have thought often of a new Christmas tradition: Scotch broth.  This is the traditional soup of this country, which, before the advent of tourism and the discovery of oil, was not wealthy, despite the transformational effects of the Enlightenment on Edinburgh. That city has long been and remains a place apart. What London is to England, Edinburgh is to Scotland - another world. go to Edinburgh and you will be as far from discovering Scotland as believing the City is England. 

Scotch broth is made from the humblest ingredients.  You can get a swede which we call a neep here, and I have just learned that some elsewhere call rutabaga, for 15p at the moment in the shops, literally pennies. It's the cheapest I have ever seen it but then it's spread across fields just now, as sheep food.  It is a more nutritious and more complex carbohydrate than potato and much less starchy than a parsnip.  Besides neep, you add onion, carrots and barley, all traditional local staples.  Barley is also a complex carbohydrate and packed with fibre, thus a significantly healthier alternative to rice and without the arsenic and food miles.  Contribute a leek, some dried peas and kale or cabbage if you can.  To this, add stock and some meat if you like, mutton traditionally but you can't come by mutton these days - even Scotch pies are no longer made with it. To stall teenage complaints I add a little good quality chicken - from which I make more stock. On a lean or busy day I add a grating of hard cheese instead.  The broth takes maybe 30 minutes to make from start to finish. 

The point of this as an alternative Christmas meal is its simplicity.  I imagine eating it, perhaps by candlelight. I can't get enough of candles in winter.

What is the point of soup and the candles? Primarily, it's calming, it's simple, it's also symbolic I suppose, a deliberate rejection of being caught up in the commercial madness of Christmas and of focusing on things that matter more, our connections as people and on the history and heritage of this country rather than on imported or invented shallow values to serve the capitalist machine. 

But the males in my family are food-focused and despite the huge stress of this traditional, complicated meal, the bro insists on turkey. And yet we all eat well,  the rest of the year.  My kids get three home-cooked meals a day if they want it and they often do. We eat weekly, with my parents, the only time in the week when the teens will agree to sit as a family at a table. Christmas lunch is a big deal if you didn't eat well most of the rest of the time. I nearly said "in the past" but this country is now one of "two halves" says a report this month by the Centre for Social Justice. Britain is "at risk of sliding into the two nations of the Victorian era".

But if you are fortunate enough to already eat sufficient and well, how much more must you do? We are caught in a time-trap of traditions no longer relevant and of obliviousness towards others.

Why this mad rush to travel on overpacked roads for one day of the year? Far better if each family, with a little more imagination and individuality, created its own few days of festivities at times that suited them through the winter.  I would delay Christmas altogether and celebrate Hogmanay instead, as was traditional here.  My grandmother used to open her shop on Christmas Day.  Within living memory, Christmas was not a big deal in Scotland, though Hogmanay was. Comic and historian, Bruce Fummey told me the other evening that his was the first generation to get presents on Christmas Day.  

My brother has seven year old twin girls and replicating, for your own children, what you enjoyed as a child is hard to resist. I know this from the absurd tyranny of stockings. You can now see on TikTok children opening broccoli or bananas on Christmas Day and being utterly delighted. I salute those parents. According to Visual Capitalist, Americans could spend $967 billion dollars this Christmas or $866 per person.

My boys, at fourteen and sixteen, both nearly six foot, agreed that turkey was the best part of Christmas - after being with family, one of them said, flashing a grin. He said it the same way he will say "Cheers" for "thank you". They know perfectly well "cheers" is for toasts.

If I practised what I preach I wouldn't present children with a candy house that would turn an adult diabetic just by looking at it. Of course, they don't have to eat it, but that's like saying, you can go to a party but you mustn't dance.

The truth is, once you have tried things better for your body you have little appetite for what is not good for it. If you bring kids up on spaghetti hoops and fish fingers as if it were still the Seventies, then what opportunity will they have to eat a healthier option? Few children will refuse healthy food when hungry enough. A gingerbread house is a one-off I tell myself, so it doesn't count.... Only Turkey and Malta has more obesity than the UK. As Ben Coates pointed out in Why the Dutch are Different - and as my Catalan friend never fails to repeat - Britain is a country where sweets are everywhere and snacking is normal.

In a superb and funny speech given a few months before his death in 2016, the food critic and writer AA Gill talked about how to avoid obesity, not by focusing on what we eat, but rather on how we eat. Here are the the last few minutes on It's all manners.

And after Christmas? 2012, the year I started dancing, I think I went to Eton after Christmas. Certainly I was in TangoMagia, Amsterdam in 2013.  Since then I have travelled I think most years to dance tango in the holiday period.  There is a festival in Barcelona, there are 10 no-book milongas that are always busy, in Old Windsor, near London. So one must usually travel to dance, to Edinburgh, to near London, abroad. I considered it and cannot summon the will. Disappointment is misplaced hope. Hope is undiscovered disappointment. I came across this sobering idea the other day and wondered if it was a sign.  But that is why for years I have gone to the milongas for reasons other than, principally, dancing: a break from family, to socialise, otherwise, you can end up fulfilling that aphorism. 

I think it is time to break from the tradition of going away. The folks need help. My kids need to study for exams and to practice mountain walks for the Duke of Edinburgh. The house needs attention. If I'm going to go out, it's going to have to be local, it may be music not dance and it won't often be tango.