Jonny McCambridge: The first Christmas column of the year

The reaction against this seems to be a natural and common one. Whatever magic is associated with Christmas inevitably becomes diluted if the season is made to stretch to cover a third of the year. Indeed, goodwill can even be replaced with disgust at the banality of the naked commercialisation.

Apparently, there is a term for this sense that the holiday season is continually being elongated – ‘Christmas creep’. I even had some trepidation about writing this column, lest it might annoy some people by daring to mention Christmas in mid-September.

I have no doubt that endless amounts of thought and money has gone into retailers’ commercial strategies around the festive season, but I imagine it can probably all be summed up quite simply – some people like to be prepared while others will always leave it to the last minute.

Now for the confession. When I was walking through the supermarket and expressing surprise to my wife that the Christmas puddings were on the shelves, I was actually shopping for ingredients to make … Christmas puddings.

And this is perhaps where my whole argument becomes inverted and collapses in on itself. There are some things which just need to be done well in advance. How can I complain about a shop selling seasonal items, when the truth is that I have been giving serious thought to Christmas for some time already?

For a start there are the presents. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis it is sensible not to spend too much money, and helpful to ensure that whatever has to be spent is spread over a few months. If buying a few items now keeps me from sliding further into debt in December, then that’s a worthwhile investment.

Then there is the Christmas dinner. I dodged having to cook for extended family last year when my wife and son had a timely Covid diagnosis, but I can already feel the pressure building ahead of this year. I have around 100 daily dinners to prepare before December 25 (including something for this evening), but the Christmas meal is already getting more thought than the rest of them combined.

My little crab-apple tree is heavily laden with fruit this year. For years, I have made crab-apple jelly as a superior accompaniment to turkey and ham than cranberry sauce. Now it is harvest time and the branches are stooping ominously; the tree needs to be plucked and the fruit preserved.

Similarly, I like to use some of the produce from my dad’s allotment to make chutneys and piccalilli to give as presents and to have some for the house for St Stephen’s Day to serve with leftover meat. That process has to be started soon.

And then there are the cakes and puddings which need to be prepared in advance, fed and matured. This is what I have been doing over recent days.

To be clear, I know that there is almost no logical and coherent argument I can present for making my own Christmas cake and pudding. They require effort and patience (I have lots of time to write this column as I currently have a pudding undergoing a five-hour steaming).

It would be much easier simply to buy one of the puddings from the supermarket which cooks in the microwave in about 60 seconds. It may well taste better than my own pud and, when I consider the cost of buying all the separate ingredients, would probably be cheaper too.

With the rich Christmas fruit cake, the baking process is just the first hurdle. It is when I start to attempt to decorate the cake that things get a bit tricky. My rough and clumsy hands seem to have ancestral memories of generations who worked the land, ploughed the fields and (at one point) threw spears at mammoths. They are not made for fine work. Rolling out marzipan and icing, trying to apply it so there are no lumps and then cutting out little bits of royal icing into the shapes of stars and snowflakes is definitely fine work.

And then there is the fact that almost nobody (apart from me) even seems to like Christmas pudding or cake. I will inevitably end up having to do a pavlova, trifle or tart for the pudding haters. I will, as every year, wake up on Boxing Day with the cake intact and most of the pudding left over (apart from the generous helping I have served myself). My abhorrence of waste means that I will end up eating servings of Christmas cake every day until mid-January until I’m sick of it.

So why do I bother? It would be nice if I could plausibly claim that I am upholding an ancient tradition, doing things to food which mean that its use can be extended throughout the bleak mid-winter and beyond, ensuring that we don’t run out of food when nothing grows. But that, of course, is nonsense. Modern retail means that I can buy any food I want at any time of the year. If I need strawberries or raspberries to top my summer berries pavlova during the winter solstice, then I just need to drive to Tesco.

No, the only reason why I can offer that I bother with the jellies, the chutneys, the puddings and cakes, is that I like doing it. It is fun – fun to make them and fun to give as presents.

I have struggled over the years to get my son interested in cooking. But the one annual exception is that he always insists on helping me make mince pies for Santa from scratch, thinking the extra effort may get him a few more items in his stocking. I can’t wait to do that again.

It is not a fact I ever intended to share with the public, but there are few things which get me quite as excited as relaxing in the evening with my copy of the Women’s Institute Complete Christmas cookbook, spending a few hours reading the recipes and thinking about what I can cook. I started this process with my favourite book this year around the middle of July.

I came in on this column by talking about Christmas creep, the sensation of shops starting to offer festive goods earlier each year. My initial instinct when I saw the mince pies on the shelves is that it was too early to be thinking about Christmas.

But the truth is, there’s probably not any time that there is not at least some small part of my brain thinking about it. I do, however, accept that I may be in the minority in this.

I’m certainly guilty of writing the first Christmas column of the year. I promise not to mention it again for at least a couple of months.