Tampering with your family's sacred Christmas traditions will leave you about as popular as someone who kicked the puppy while everyone was looking
IT'S AMAZING the sort of small slip-up that sends people into absolute uproar, and which almost gets you lynched.
A year ago, we were making the Christmas tree, an annual ritual in our house and everyone else's.
The ritual is carefully orchestrated by my three children, and goes like this. The tree is bought at a nice wee general store in Bantry on a Friday.
It is my job to get it home, and to trim the bottom branches so it will go in the traditional bucket with the traditional sand and stones. On Saturday, the task of decoration begins, with all hands on deck.
As my aesthetic judgment when it comes to decorating Christmas trees is the subject of some derision, once I have got the tree in the bucket with the traditional sand and stones, it's my gig to light the fire, choose the music CDs, and to make the drinks.
This is a relatively simple matter. Ever since I discovered a drink called orange-miel at a Christmas market in Strasbourg years ago, I am required to make orange-miels for the children as they sort the lights, the angels, the chocolate men and the tinsel.
So, squeeze the oranges, warm the juice and melt in a few tablespoons of honey. For the adult workers, just pop open the white wine.
So, the orange is warming, the wine is chilling, and I have found the Christmas CDs: Phil Spector's mighty and never matched A Christmas Gift For You(easily the greatest Christmas CD ever recorded) and Yule Struttin': A Blue Note Christmas, a lovely compilation of lots of jazzers riffing happily on seasonal standards.
But, about a week before, I had heard Duke Special, singing live in an RTÉ studio, and hammering out a version on the piano of Ash's great song, Shining Light.
"It's a nativity song," explained the Duke.
And there was the Ash CD, Free All Angels, on the shelf, known by my children almost note for note.
What a nice surprise it would be for them to hear that, rather than Darlene Love belting out White Christmas, the song that traditionally heralds the real beginning of the season.
So, I slipped in the Ash CD, chose track two, shouted out, "Hey guys, listen to this," turned up the volume, hit PLAY, picked up the tray of drinks and began to walk out of the kitchen down to where they were working away.
Tim Wheeler picked out the opening notes, began to strum the chords, and started to sing: "Roman candles that burn in the night, yeah you are a shining light . . ." What a great song!
In the living room, I was greeted by four ashen faces.
Ashen faces wearing That Look.
You know That Look. Homer Simpson knows That Look.
It is composed of disbelief, disappointment, disgust and a distraught bewilderment.
I had just made a fundamental error. I had tampered with ritual.
You don't tamper with ritual. Ritual is sacred to young people. Ritual meant that my job was to sort the tree, light the fire, make the drinks, then play the festive tunes, starting with Darlene Love singing White Christmas.
How come the ground never swallows you up when you need it, but just leaves you there, feeling like someone who kicked the puppy while everyone was looking?
"Eh, it's a nativity song. Duke Special said so," I explained.
Silence. Except for Ash, that is.
I suddenly understood how seemingly inexplicable things - homicides at a time of goodwill, for example - could come to happen.
"What are you doing?" How can four people ask the same question simultaneously?
"It's a nativity song. It's Christmas."
"It's not our Christmas!"
"I thought it might be fun to hear something new."
"We don't want to hear anything new!"
"Eh, will I put on the Phil Spector?"
"Yesss!"
Ritual. Ritual explains Santa Claus and Phil Spector. It explains brussels sprouts and Christmas cracker jokes. Midnight mass and the school play, that's ritual.
Ritual explains why people on diets suddenly insist on cooking sausages wrapped in rashers for the Christmas meal.
It explains why my mother makes three types of potato for the family meal (roast, mashed and potato croquettes. Now you know).
You don't mess with ritual. "Rites", wrote the social scientist Emile Durkheim, "are the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of these sacred objects."
My comportment was lousy. In the midst of sacred objects I was falling over like a drunk, behaving like the oik who would dare - dare! - to speak whilst everyone is watching It's A Wonderful Lifeon the telly.
I put Darlene Love on. Five minutes later, all was well.
You can't break ritual. You can bend it, but it always corrects itself, always comes back to true. You don't like brussels sprouts? Save that culinary disdain for the other 364 days of the year. You are on a diet? Your diet recommences tomorrow.
Ritual explains why the Christmas dinner is not just special, but almost sacred. We want to break bread with our nearest and dearest, in the most meaningful, yet also celebratory, way.
This is why you can't tamper with the content. This is why Irish fishmongers have to get carp for their Polish customers. This is why dad has to carve the bird even though he can barely open a ready meal most of the time.
Ritual is why the Christmas table must boast largesse, as well as finesse.
So what if it is a cliche? It is a cliche we know, love and understand.
A friend of mine, the food writer Emily Green, once wrote an article proposing certain dishes for vegetarians at Christmas, and innocently suggested serving welsh rarebit. The uproar was instantaneous. Emily escaped with her life but, like my faux pas with Ash, it was a pretty close thing.
But why do children, especially, cling so determinedly to the Christmas rituals? Why must everything be the same every year?
I would love to cook goose, and parsnip cakes for the meal: do you think I am ever going to get the chance? Will we start the meal with something other than smoked salmon? No, we won't.
"Ritual gives meaning to our world in part by linking the past to the present and the present to the future," writes David I Kertzer, in his book Ritual, Politics and Power. And maybe that's the key to why the youngsters love ritual at Christmas time.
Ritual explains why they play with nativity scenes that come from a world two thousand years old that they can have little comprehension of. Ritual explains how one year Santa comes down the chimney, and the next year he doesn't, but you don't let on to your baby brother.
And therefore you begin to play your part in this beautiful deception: "keeping the magic" as our school teachers call it.
Ritual makes sense of the mysteries we ask our children to believe.
So, there will be no tampering with the ritual this year, for ritual is the keeper of the magic. The elves are hard at work, Santa is on schedule, and should you be passing near our place on a Saturday afternoon, then you will hear Darlene Love singing White Christmas.
And, someday soon, the final piece of the ritual will fall into place, and the children will say "Yes, please" when asked if they would like some brussels sprouts with their turkey.
• John McKenna is a food critic and writer. He is co-author of The Bridgestone Guideswhich aim to provide independent guides to Ireland's food culture. www.bridgestoneguides.com