Like your first hangover and your first speeding ticket, cooking Christmas lunch for the first time is a rite of passage. It is a passing of the flame from one generation to the next, with added gravy. I remember mine as if it was 25 years ago. Two things stay with me. One was my late mother’s nod of approval at the sweet and sour red cabbage. It wasn’t her red cabbage. It could never be hers. But it did deserve to be eaten. That was praise enough.
The other memory was the admin. Blimey, it was complicated. I had to write timetables, like I was revising for A-levels all over again, only with a greater risk of humiliation through failure. Pinned up by the fridge magnets were documents that had taken on the significance of holy scripture: “12 noon – potatoes in; 1.30pm, bird out”. And so on. When it was all done and the kitchen was festooned in edible wreckage, I took the applause and muttered quietly about not making a habit of it.
And yet, come year two I was in the kitchen again, right up to my wrist in the turkey. It was the same the next year and the year after that. For, somewhere along the way, I had made a quiet but astonishing discovery, one most Christmas Day cooks will recognise but never acknowledge.
They don’t want to be found out, because intriguingly it goes against the spirit of Christmas itself. It is this: cooking Christmas lunch is a glorious way to absent yourself from the nightmare of Christmas; from the weird, twisted dynamic of one long day crammed together with your family.
It’s perfect. There has to be a Christmas lunch. Whoever cooks it is seen as performing a selfless service. Look at them toiling over the sprouts and the parsnips and the roasties and the pigs in blankets and no really, I’m fine, you go back in there and relax. I’ve got this. If you are up to the job, spending the first few hours of the day locked in the kitchen, can be much more pleasurable than tolerating your racist auntie. Plus, courtesy of natural justice, you get let off the washing up. It is a big, hearty bundle of wins.
It took me a while to clock that my mother had pulled this trick throughout my childhood. She hated her own in-laws but also knew they had to be there. She had a two-pronged approach to the problem. The first was to invite an enormous number of people. Christmas Day in our house could have up to 30 people at the table, mostly gay men, Jews and actors: gay men, because in the 70s, sadly, many of them had mislaid their families; Jews because they weren’t really meant to be marking the pagan feast at all so were always free, and actors because they were caught between performances of panto on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day and couldn’t get back to their own families. Many of them were gay Jewish actors.
Having hidden my paternal grandparents in this relentlessly jazz-hands crowd, she disappeared into the kitchen, guaranteeing she was as far away from them as possible. Now I’ve described this, of course, the game is up. So, here’s what you do. This year, come the big day, don’t let them get away with it. Everybody should set up camp in the kitchen telling the self-absenting cook that you don’t want them to feel left out. It will drive them completely nuts. Merry Christmas.
