Christmas article – Memories of Christmas past

published in the December Issue of Shropshire Life Magazine

Although I am only 41 I feel as if I have at least 60 years of Christmas memories. This is because I was an afterthought (or more of a lack of thought as my mother sweetly said...over and over again!)

My four older siblings were grouped tightly together and enjoyed glorious family Christmases for sixteen years before I came along and I grew to know their memories as well as my own. As a small child I loved to hear how my brother booby-trapped the bedroom door for an unwitting Father Christmas, the time when a dinner guest’s recent varicose vein operation resulted in the turkey going cold as my poor mother mopped up blood from the dining room carpet while my sister lay in a swoon in the hall. And the year my other sisters piped up loudly during silent prayer in church that they hoped Aunty Joan wouldn’t give quite such horrid sponge bags again this year.

By around 1972 I think it is fair to say that the effort had been taken out of Christmas - largely by my mother. She couldn’t be bothered with all the decorating and given the choice wouldn’t have stepped foot in a shop at any point. But, before you picture me as a starving waif I will add that what my Christmases lacked in entertainment (and good presents) was more than made up for in the kitchen. For weeks it seemed we were popping sweet almonds from their warm wet skins, getting chestnut peel stuck inside our finger nails, stroking egg yolk on to lengths of sausage rolls and all the while the Kenwood turned and gently rocked with the motion of the blades. I can still smell the not unpleasant oily odour of the motor. By the time my mother was standing by her machine on Christmas Eve making brandy butter (always needing to pour in more than the recipe stated) the window behind her was black as night and we both knew Christmas was nearly upon us.

I loved it all, the preparation, the gathering of the family, stockings..... but as far as food memories go I cannot better the Christmas Dinner.

As I was the only child in the family (a fact that was wonderfully overlooked) we ate ruinously late in the evening. Champagne, salted almonds in little silver dishes that hadn’t seen the light of day for a whole year, my father carving in a dinner jacket, buttery bread sauce, the turkey; shiny and conker brown and a table that glittered and dazzled in truly Edwardian splendour. It all seemed so incredibly glamorous to me and so full of ceremony.

After the turkey came the entrance of the pudding which involved much whispering and giggling in the hallway, then an age of time while my mother faffed around with heated slops of brandy and burnt out matches but we all clapped at the site of that black orb in an aura of blue flame. (It was a 1954 recipe which I still have on yellowed paper in my mother’s faded type). I didn’t like the pudding much but I loved the brandy butter. It was never made with icing sugar because my mother said she preferred it with a bit of crunch. I agree.

And the best bit was finding a charm. They were almost unrecognisable due to years of biting but I so wanted one. There was a nasty moment one year when my newly estranged sister got the married couple and of course my rather portly Aunt had a habit of getting the pig. But as my sister said, it served her right for giving such horrid sponge bags.

Millys Menus. 2010