A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  P. G.

  We’ll take a more forensic look at turkey in the next chapter, but a four-kilo Bernard Matthews Golden Norfolk can, in the wrong hands, be transformed into a lethal weapon. On one hand you have the predictable annual spike in food poisoning as people either read the instructions wrongly or fail to weigh the turkey properly, while others simply attack their Christmas food with a little too much enthusiasm while simultaneously laughing at a cracker joke about Santa’s pizza being deep and crisp and even.

  Carmarthen, Christmas 1997

  Christmas is important to us. We look forward to it so much, and my mum is a really good Christmas hostess. She’d been up since the early hours making Christmas dinner, and at lunchtime the four of us sat down at the table, me, my brother, my mum and dad.

  My dad took one bite of a piece of turkey and started to choke on it. It was stuck. Panic set in. He got up and ran into the kitchen. My mum, who is calm and cool in a crisis, said, ‘Stay here kids, just going to sort your dad out, everything’s fine!’ Then we heard noises from the kitchen which indicated that all was not well. My mum came back in and said, ‘Dad’s fine’ – he clearly wasn’t – and then, in the nicest voice possible, ‘You stay here, we’re just going to nip up to the hospital. Won’t be long!’ So we sat there, me and my brother, at opposite ends of the dinner table, eating Christmas dinner on our own. We were weirded out by it. We had no idea what was happening. They came back two hours later. My dad looked very shaken. My mum said, ‘OK, shall we just carry on?’

  N. B.

  Relatively innocuous objects without warning labels suddenly start to pose a grave threat. There’s a recurring statistic that Christmas trees cause around 1,000 injuries in British homes every year, and fairy lights can bring additional trauma to the party. Between 1996 and 2014, thirty-one people died from watering their Christmas trees while the lights were still plugged in, which might seem like a blindingly obvious error when you read about it, but humans can come up with endlessly ingenious ways of damaging themselves. People get burns and shocks from old lights that would give a safety inspector an aneurysm, and then fall off a chair while trying to put them up. The pursuit of a more authentic Christmas vibe will bring candles out of British drawers in their thousands, their tens of thousands, onto shelves and tables that wouldn’t normally host them. My friend Ed recalls a Christmas dinner as a child when he shot a party popper towards his grandfather through a candle flame, setting fire to his jumper. ‘He thought on his feet,’ says Ed, ‘because he’d been in the Army – he’d fought against the Japanese in Burma among other things – and he doused the flames with the nearest drink to hand. Unfortunately that was whisky, which acted as an accelerant. My mother rescued him with a tea towel and some water.’ Quick thinking can avert disaster, but fire can be catastrophic. And sometimes we fail to exercise sufficient caution because we’re too busy thinking about the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ and sweet singing in the choir.

  Surrey, Christmas 2008

  It was late on the night of Christmas Eve, and people started going to bed. My mum, my dad, my uncle, and my friend who was over from Australia to experience a ‘typical’ British Christmas. I stayed up late watching a film, and about one o’clock I turned the telly off and went around to check that all the doors and windows were shut. Then I heard a noise from the dining room. I went to the door and I could hear a crackling. I opened the door, and it was like a backdraft, the fire shooting up to the ceiling. A candle had been left burning by my dad, and the whole table was in flames. It must have been burning for hours.

  I remember thinking, ‘What shall I do? Everyone is asleep’ I knocked on my parents door and said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but the dining room is on fire’ My dad shot downstairs in his navy blue Y-fronts. I woke up everyone in the house and told them to get out. I remember my uncle put all his clothes on and packed his suitcase and stood outside as if he was ready to go back to Scotland. I’m surprised he hadn’t had a shower. The fire brigade turned up, and while we stood in the living room afterwards they gave my dad a dressing down for not having smoke alarms. He said, ‘I do!’, and pointed to the corner where they were all sitting. In their boxes. I remember my friend from Australia saying to me, ‘Are British Christmases always like this?’

  C. I.

  In an earlier chapter we acknowledged the chaos that can descend as a consequence of drinking too much alcohol, and the accident fairy hovers very intently over pissed people at Christmas, whether they’re running with scissors or carrying enormous tureens full of hot peas. It’s not often that people end up buried under a whole kitchen cupboard full of crockery, but the chances of that happening are much greater on Christmas Day after a few drinks have been consumed. Judgement is impaired, perception of distance goes awry, navigational skills evaporate. As the organisation First Aid For Life accurately points out, people staying with you over the holidays ‘may be unfamiliar with the layout of the house and could fall downstairs whilst going to the loo’, and that confusion can be exacerbated by mind-altering substances.

  London, Christmas 2015

  In the lead-up to Christmas I had terrible chest pains. I thought I had pneumonia, despite having no idea what pneumonia felt like. On Christmas Eve I took myself to A&E and spent Christmas night in bed opposite an aged Rastafarian who was screaming that he was going to die.

  In the morning a doctor came round and asked me questions, including, ‘Have you ever taken drugs?’ I hardly ever do, but about a month previously, I’d taken the tiniest amount of cocaine. And for some reason I went into ultra honesty mode. ‘Yes, I took some cocaine,’ I said, and from that point on it became the reason I was there. The doctor came back with some junior doctors who surrounded the bed. She pointed at me and said, ‘This man has been taking cocaine!’ I was so embarrassed. I said, ‘I’m hardly Pablo Escobar’, which only made things worse as it looked as if I was in denial. They discharged me with heavy admonishment never to take cocaine again. I still have no idea what was wrong with me.

  A. C.

  Consuming drink and drugs is one way that people try to alleviate the stress of dealing with relatives, but another common strategy is for burdened families to simply remove those relatives from the equation. ‘You get what we call the granny dumps,’ says Joanna Cannon, ‘when people don’t want their elderly relatives at Christmas. The wards pile up with old people, but there’s nothing really wrong with them. In their notes it’ll say that the cause of admission is “acopia”, meaning an inability of the family to cope. It’s tragic, really.’

  The committed souls who keep our hospitals running over Christmas are truly heroic, fire fighting situations that would make a normal week on the wards feel like a beach holiday in the Seychelles. ‘People who come in are generally quite good humoured,’ says Joanna, ‘but you do get a certain contingent who’ve had too much to drink and they come in with all their friends. One of them needs attention, but twenty people turn up because they don’t want to be in A&E on their own. But it’s a place like no other. The camaraderie between the staff is amazing, there’s a kind of war spirit, the idea of us going out to battle. If you’re on call, you’ll be covering the whole hospital and tending to people that you don’t know very well. Obviously you’ve got the notes to hand, but it’s a lot of pressure.’

  Some hospitals will make a special effort to make the wards a jolly place to be at Christmas, with music, Santa hats and celebrity appearances, but there’s a deep incompatibility between Christmas and drug rounds, or Christmas and leg ulcers. You’d rather not be lying there at all. You’d rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  Cuenca, Christmas 2002

  I was travelling around South America with my boyfriend. On 23 December I found myself on a bus in Ecuador feeling really ill and getting worse. The next day I was really sick. The main thing I remember is hallucinating about fish. I saw a doctor, who diagnosed an ear infection. He gave me shots in my arse and I was admitted
to hospital.

  I had really good treatment, but I didn’t speak any Spanish, so everything was confusing. I didn’t know how to tell them that I was a vegetarian, so they kept bringing me meat to eat. I had terrible diarrhoea, and I remember on Christmas Day I was watching a South American soap opera on TV when a nurse came in, pulled down my underwear and gave me a bed bath. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Later in the day my dad called me. He rambled on in a sentimental, drunken fashion about how great it was that my horizons had been opened up by travelling around the world. So I reminded him that I was in bed with mastoiditis and a nurse had just washed my fanny.

  C. C.

  It’s a sad fact to acknowledge in a book that’s supposed to be vaguely lighthearted, but death rates go up at Christmas. My maternal grandmother died over Christmas in 2004, just a few hours after the family had travelled to her bedside at Morriston Hospital near Swansea. Now, I’m no doctor, and you won’t find this in The Lancet, so don’t bother looking, but I like to imagine that she’d hung on to see us on Christmas Day. When she’d done so, and we’d given her her presents, and gone home, she quietly checked out of this troubled world. Earlier that same day the tsunami had hit in the Indian Ocean; I remember as we sat at home later on, with turkey sandwiches on plates, my mother pondered a heaven-style scenario where her mother showed up to find a quarter of a million people ahead of her waiting to be processed. ‘She’d be terribly annoyed at having to queue,’ she said. The memory of that day, and that celestial queue, adds a melancholy tinge to our Christmas, as it does for any families with unhappy seasonal anniversaries. But the reminder that we’re all vulnerable and that life is fleeting is also a reminder that our time here should be enjoyed to its fullest. And, with that in mind, we’ll raise a glass and pull a cracker – hopefully without taking someone’s eye out.

  Harlow, Christmas 2002

  For years we’ve had this tradition in my family where we do scratch cards on Christmas Day. One of the first years we did it we were sat at the dinner table. My dad was wearing his Christmas hat, he picked up his scratch card, scratched it off and said, ‘Oh, I’ve won a pound.’ He then fainted, rolled off his chair and onto the floor.

  K. P.

  Four Appalling Burps

  Mark: Where’s the turkey?

  Jeremy: I thought you were getting the turkey.

  Mark: You what? No turkey?! You total fucking idiot! That was your job, you fucking moron! You cretin! You’re a fuckhead! That’s what you are! A fucking shithead!

  Jeremy: It was a joke, Mark. I was joking. It was a Christmas joke.

  Peep Show, Christmas 2002

  These days, as Christmas unfolds, you’ll see thousands of people revealing their gluttony on social media by using the phrase ‘I’m stuffed’. It comes in many different forms, from ‘Can’t breathe I’m stuffed’ to ‘I’m stuffed but still eating even though I can barely move’ to ‘I’m stuffed, time to buy a treadmill (and just look at it)’. Christmas has long been a time of calorific indulgence for those who could afford it; if you look in any foodie history book you’ll see big, meaty lists of Tudor Christmas fayre, with colourful descriptions of tables laden with mutton, goose, venison, partridge and turkey, which, let’s face it, represents a spectacularly unhealthy five-a-day. There was a brief pause in our frenetic gobbling in the 1600s when Puritanism started making us feel fat and guilty: spices, we were told, would prompt unclean thoughts, while pie consumption was effectively equated with treason. One can only imagine what the Puritans would have made of Mr Kipling’s Frosty Fancies.

  We soon got back into the eating habit. A French chap by the name of Maximilien Misson wrote an keenly observed account of British life in 1698, noting that ‘Every Family [at] Christmas makes a famous Pye, which they call Christmas Pye… It is a most learned Mixture of Neats-tongues, Chicken, Eggs, Sugar, Raisins, Lemon and Orange Peel’, which sounds repulsive and makes me wonder why we didn’t immediately run back into the welcoming arms of Puritanism. But we didn’t. In the mid nineteenth century, Dickens described an alarmingly large Christmas feast of ‘turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes…’ This desire to emulate an excessive medieval banquet continues today, with millions of us loading entire Christmas cakes into our mouths, ramming sausage rolls into our nostrils and plunging our heads into buckets of port. We’re proud of our ability to pack it away, and pack it away we do. My great grandfather would, after a hearty meal, describe himself as having had ‘an elegant sufficiency’, but elegant consumption is rare at Christmas. It’s every man for himself.

  My nan had rheumatoid arthritis, so her fingers always bent in a bit. This made her really amazing at making shortcrust pastry, and she would make these fantastic shortcrust sausage rolls for Christmas. After my gran died my mum took over the mantle, but like many mums, she’s an excessive caterer. I think she thinks we’re going to waste away to nothing. She makes hundreds of these things, but there’s only my mum, my sister and me for Christmas. I’ve developed this resting sausage-roll face where I think, ‘Well, I’m sitting down, so I may as well have a few more along with a Baileys.’ So it’s turned into a tradition where my sister and I, over the course of two or three days, compete to eat as many of them as possible. It’s continual, like background noise. I always eat more than my sister, though. She’s a bit smaller than me – and she’s also a GP, so she knows she really shouldn’t be packing that many away.

  L. C., Devon

  Preparations for the inter-family eating bout begin early, with turkeys secured well in advance and money splurged on food that comes in a presentation box and claims to have something to do with Christmas but doesn’t. The marketing genius at Iceland who, a decade ago, managed to establish the King Prawn Ring as a Christmas essential deserves some kind of special award. It was like selling sand to the Saudis; as if we didn’t have enough stuff to shove in our faces, we figured that if Kerry Katona or Coleen Nolan said we needed a King Prawn Ring, we may as well stick one in the trolley as it’s only three quid. From Christmas tea blends to luxury hampers of unseasonal food from Spain decorated with a Merry Christmas ribbon, we overbuy in readiness to overeat39 – and the stress of doing food shopping can be just as over-whelming as shopping for gifts. One Christmas Eve a friend of mine saw a couple having a ferocious argument in Waitrose that culminated in one of them shouting ‘BUT WE DON’T NEED A PERSIMMON’, which pretty much sums up the Christmas food haul. People don’t need a persimmon, but they’ll buy one anyway, just in case.

  East Kilbride, Christmas 1994

  I worked in Kwik Save one Christmas Eve. They only had two of us on the tills and the queues were stretching round the aisles, but folk were too desperate to get their Christmas food to give up and go elsewhere. After a while, they started eating sweets and snacks from the shelves without paying for them. The staff were so harassed and pissed off by this point that we didn’t pull anyone up on it, so the spirits of the queuers lifted, partly due to the sugar rush and partly the feeling that they were ‘sticking it to the man’. By the end they were glugging whole bottles of Coke and munching tubes of Pringles before they got to the checkout.

  R. S.

  Given that when you wake up on Christmas morning the turkey is already marching purposefully towards you over the brow of a hill accompanied by foot soldiers made of solid carbohydrate, it’s surprising that we don’t deem breakfast unnecessary and just have some grapefruit juice. But across the UK, bacon sandwiches have become a bizarrely self-defeating way to limber up for the big event. Citizens of the East Midlands, from Hinckley to Burton upon Trent and beyond, take things a step further with pork pie sandwiches, pork pie on toast or pork pies with pickle or ketchup. This regional tradition apparently causes winding queues to form outside Walkers pie shop in Leicester city centre on the morning of C
hristmas Eve, and I’m baffled as to why the rest of the country doesn’t follow suit, given our untrammelled enthusiasm for Christmas meat. But not everyone is able to indulge their Christmas appetite in the way they might like.

  Christmas food is a big deal for our family. My mum does that thing where we’ve just eaten all the food in the world and then she wanders in with some cheese. But last Christmas I’d just had surgery on my jaw, an operation they call a maxillary osteotomy. I knew that I would have a compromised Christmas dinner; I thought it would be liquidised, maybe soups and smoothies, but my mouth wouldn’t shut properly and I couldn’t get a grip on the straw.

  So I was drinking flat pop using a 100ml syringe, and trying to eat things that might be Christmassy. My centrepiece was a cheese soufflé. We tried heating up mincemeat and pulverising that and putting it on ice cream, but that didn’t work. It tasted Christmassy but it wasn’t very nice. Creamed sprouts weren’t that great. I managed a bit of the inside of a roast potato, and some marzipan, and I forced down a bit of turkey because my mum was upset that I couldn’t have any. But in general there wasn’t much sympathy. My sister was mainly laughing at me.

  P. A., Pocklington

  The British relationship with turkey is an uneasy one. There’s an annual complaint that it’s ‘too dry’, a withering accusation levelled at a blameless bird who can’t do very much about it. If turkeys could speak, which they can’t, but if they could, they’d shrug and say, ‘Mate, we didn’t vote to be slaughtered.’ Despite our ambivalence towards turkey, polls suggest that around 75 per cent of British families buy one for Christmas dinner40 anyway. It’s not clear why the turkey nosed in front of mutton, goose, venison or partridge to become the nation’s favourite Christmas food (to complain about), but once again, Dickens might have had something to do with its entrenchment as a national habit. When Scrooge finally sees the error of his ways in A Christmas Carol, he buys Bob Cratchit a prize turkey that’s ‘twice the size of Tiny Tim’. By the 1920s or 1930s, a turkey was what British people wanted, a huge turkey, a massive turkey that you needed a pushchair to move to and fro.