Who needs candles when the lights on the branches of my grandmother’s Christmas tree burn hotter than quark soup. Getting them on, and then to come on, is a challenge outsourced to one of my uncles who doesn’t mind, not a bit, being electrocuted across the living room, from front door to fender where 15 bottles of uncorked Chateau Lafite are slowly coming to a boil. He’ll be ok. And the wine will be perfect come breakfast.
Never mind all that. This mostly is a merry tale. A wholesome Dickensian yarn about things like eking out goose with apple sauce and being not-so-nice to the hungry (although our goose never needed eking because it usually weighed in at thrice the weight of the backup turkey and five times the weight of the clove-studded, backup-backup ham). But who really cared about ham besides my uncle who dreamed of the sandwiches he’d have (solo) the next day when he would be away, far away, from here?
“What a scrawny old bird,” my mother says, coming into the kitchen where my grandmother is sobbing at the stove. It’s taking all the strength she has to move a spoon through the stuffing which is sticking to her ribs even before it’s out of the pot. The goose, meanwhile, looks like it’s breaking the back of the table, leaving no hope for the aforementioned ham which is oinking to come out of the oven. Or perhaps it’s the platter of fudge and truffles that’s the straw. These before-during-and-after-dinner sweetmeats are the pillars of our family Christmas, all crafted, over months, to utmost more-ishness by my aunt. You’d never know they didn’t come from Waitrose! These hefty squares of absurdly rich fudge and uber-boozed, oft-gold-dusted truffles had to be shop-bought. We wondered endlessly about their true provenance, and – in the interest of getting to the facts – we taste-tested/mowed/wolfed/scarfed our way through each platter as soon as it emerged from the larder.
“You don’t get much meat off a goose,” my mother reiterates. My grandmother is still crying, still cement-mixing the stuffing. My mother, though, is putting a bit of salt in the cellar, or picking a bead of bird spit off the sprig of holly which awaits the pudding, still boiling like a coddled baby beneath a bouncing saucepan lid. Or, she’s smoking a cigarette, doing her best not to puff smoke right at the goose, but blowing it more considerately up toward the clothesline down from which the linen napkins still must come. (“Oh, Mummy, of course they don’t need an iron!”)
Who else is in this picture? Maybe my other uncle who has just arrived from London, flux-capacitored himself back to his roots in his banana-colored Morgan. He didn’t want to come, but felt, for his mother’s sake, he must. And here he is stepping through the door, the night behind, in a floor-to-ceiling fur, snowflakes in his Bay City Roller hair. But I’m blurring things because that, actually, was last night’s picture; it was Christmas Eve when he came, bringing in – along with the icy air – even more magic than there already was. “Alexander, is that you?”
So back to Christmas morn, the chocolates and chocolates and goose. Back to the kitchen where it’s warm and the windows have steamed, and you can’t really see anymore that there’s a dusting of snow on the yew. You can’t see either the stockings we’d hung for the birds – the fruit-netted pouches we’d stuffed with peanuts and seeds and bacon bits, and pegged to the line. Or the little saucer of milk for the hedgehog, which – mercifully – she got to before it froze. In here, among these grand and fevered Christmas proceedings, you can’t make out those other, smaller things at all.
But, wow, I haven’t even got to ‘The Bendicks.’ I haven’t yet touched on those plump minty buttons enrobed (yes, that) in darkest, bitterest chocolate, and wrapped in silver. Somewhere on their sleek green box was a crest which recognized the buttons for being a staple of the Royal larder. And we saluted them, as well, for being a requisite of ours. Or perhaps we kids would have done so if we’d been allowed more than one. But no, these were treats of the very highest order reserved for the very drunk, very rude and over-forty. Unless, of course, no one was looking.
My father’s biggest Christmas peeve (the thing sure to detonate the UXB that forever ticked inside him) was my mother at the walnuts. He hated every part of this Christmas custom: the way she readied the old crackers in her lap, the way her hand windhovered like a hawk over the bowl, and then the sound of ruckling nuts as she hunted – now with the intensity of a Kunekune truffle hog – for a brazil. And then, worst of all, the cracking itself. This noise, in particular, had his nerves (rather interestingly) on edge. Either he was embarrassed by this public display of bottomless appetite (Jesus, is there no end?!) Or wigged out because, looking across at my mother, he was making the completely understandable yet wholly unconscious jump from nut to skull.
But what about that pudding? That “speckled cannon-ball” as Dickens so perfectly put it. Because here it comes now – the baby stripped of its swaddling clothes . . . and on fire. Who sparked that Swan Vesta? Who doused baby in 100-proof rum and set it alight? I wonder if it was my mother again? She was the one with the matches.
The little wobbly flame was the purply-blue of a hyacinth, and — unlike the hard and quite unyielding pudding beneath — it was an ephemera. In the going-down light, and stunned to silence, we watched until it was gone.
AB - 25.12.22