Ding dong merrily on high: it’s December already. Time to defrost the frosting, soak your prunes in anorak, I mean Armagnac, roast your petrified nuts, pour perfectly good wine into a saucepan with a vat of sugar and a brace of cloves, dry dancing swirls of orange peel in your hot press (I’ve no idea why people do that) and crawl under the stairs to find last year’s fairy lights, which will have become, inevitably, over the course of the long year, more knotted than the veins in your ageing snow-white calves.
You’ve got less than a fortnight left before the Santa police come and check under the sink to see if you’ve disinfected the dustpan and polished the waste pipe. Any minute now, your Auntie Peggy will be dumping her eggnog in your aspidistra and running her swollen, frostbitten fingers over your occasional table, looking for telltale signs of slovenly, unfestive dust. There ain’t no such thing as a free Christmas lunch, baby, you need to wake up and smell the chocolate mocha.
Christmas pudding
Don't think you can lie around on your buy-now-pay-later memory-foam couch, wrapped up in your acrylic reindeer suit, chortling away at the hungry I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! contestants, with a lump of chocolate orange in your maw, and expect everything to fall into place like a light dusting of snowflakes. Your Christmas pudding won't arrive on your festive table as spruce and juicy and perfectly formed as a well-planned baby in a manger unless you get up off your Yuletide backside. (Christmas pudding, you cry: weren't you supposed to make that in July?)
Whatever. It’s time to pull up your Christmas socks, line your cake tins in parchment, park your spray tans in aspic, prefreeze your parboiled parsnips and lavish your Botticellian backsides in brandy butter (ask a Kardashian – it’s all the rage).
I walked into the local supermarket the other day, feeling woozy and pinpricked, my throat zinging, like I’d eaten a family pack of razor blades (although I think I probably just have a cold). I wanted something that would make me feel better, and, seeing that nobody was offering me a sun holiday, I thought I’d buy myself some soup.
Soup, however, is no longer a few mushy vegetables in a bit of stock; it’s a lifestyle choice. What’s with the new trend in marketing that insists on the packaging reading like a missive from an irritating pen-pal in Jesus sandals? Why does the labelling have to be so damn wholesome and overfriendly?
“Our mung bean and butternut squash soup is so lovingly prepared it comes to a spoon near you peppered with air kisses and a master’s in environmental studies.”
Or “our courgette and white bean broth gets tucked up in bed with a hot-water bottle, three metrosexuals and a book of knitting patterns.”
Or something equally irritating.
Oh, come on. We all know well that someone somewhere in an unflattering hairnet is on the minimum wage to stir the slop around in a vat.
I was doing fine, winding my way to the checkout with a tub of something drinkable that didn’t require a marriage proposal and shares in a donkey sanctuary to take it off the shelf, when Bing Crosby burst out of the speakers. I should have known: it’s always Bing Crosby who will do for you.
Just when you've pulled yourself out of the mire, they'll knock you back in again with a simpering, nauseating, molasses-soaked blast of White Christmas.
Organic turnip
“Enough,” I croaked to the tub of liquidised organic turnip that had been bathed in a mountain stream and dried by giddy cherubs. “That’s it. I know when to admit defeat. I’ve decided that the only way to survive the season is to give up curmudgeonliness. From now on, every last plastic reindeer antler sticking out of someone’s SUV is going to fill me with seasonal cheer.”
I went home and entered the following words into my search engine: “Preparations for a perfect Christmas.”
Next week, if Santa doesn’t object, and I don’t get eaten by marzipan elves or run over by a people-carrier with a red nose stuck on the bull bars, I’ll share my research.
Not now, though: apparently it’s time to stock up on quail eggs, so I’m going shopping again, with cottonwool balls in my shell-likes.