This will be my third Christmas without Dad. I miss him and his food
As the most gluttonous month of the year arrives, we are reminded that celebrating a British Christmas is less about worshipping Jesus and more about (self) serving at the altar of food. From 1 December, it is pretty much a solid month of eschewing plates of crispy, vamped-up vegetables at office parties and sinking your teeth into indistinguishable party-platter pastries.
Christmas is getting tempted by towers of teeth-clampingly sweet treats, displayed everywhere from your own bedside cabinet to the doctor’s surgery. Food is Christmas. Christmas is food. And with every nostalgia-coated mouthful comes a gravy boat full of memories deep enough to drown in.
For me, the taste of Christmas has always been very sweet and very crumbly. What can I say? I love pastry. My granny’s apple pie is nothing short of ambrosial and my dad’s shortbread biscuits were simply the best. My granny passed her love of cooking on to my dad, who was also a chef, and he passed it on to me. The first memory I have of baking is me, aged five or so, propped up on a chair, cutting shortbread rounds from a slab of squidgy pastry, tucked underneath Dad’s elbow in our kitchen in December. Now I can’t walk past a tartan-topped gift box without scoffing the lot.
Food is a comforting tool of nostalgia, which is why we love to overindulge at Christmas with all the things that we find tastiest. It is part of celebrating, and it also reminds us of good times with people we love. After all, counting Christmases is a way to catalogue time; marking the year’s end by feasting, indulging and drinking to excess, until we are practically sick, is a tried and tested tradition. Come December, we dutifully prepare to waddle into another year; bloated, unrestrained by buckle or belt but, ultimately, at peace.
This year will be the third Christmas I have spent without my dad and the third time I have felt disconnected from the Christmas traditions he built with my mum and brother, in the kitchen and beyond. On Christmas morning, it used to be the crispiest roast potato competition, with my brother and I fighting to pick the best one. After the prawn cocktail starter, Dad’s soft, herby stuffing was the highlight of dinner and later, bellies bursting, we would rack up the cheeses. Mum’s portions were always dainty and she would roll her eyes in mock disapproval as Dad created a comical, towering blue cheese-to-cracker ratio, which often looked as if it would break before it reached his mouth.
Christmas was split between our family home and Dad’s parents in Shropshire, who also know how to do a proper spread. But last year, for the first time, I took myself to sunny climes when Mum and I weren’t really speaking. The aim, of course, was to go somewhere so un-Christmas-like that I would forget the fact that baby Jesus was ever born. I surrounded myself with sunshine and pina coladas instead of cranberry sauce and crackers, and it kind of worked. I got blind drunk alone in a hostel and ate a most unsatisfactory Christmas dinner of chicken, rice and beans, which really didn’t hit the spot. Christmas is about what you feel in your heart, of course, but also in your stomach.
This year, my mum and my brother and I are going to Rome – something Dad would not really have been up for, seeing as he was a traditionalist and a homebird at heart.
I am not sure how it is going to play out (I have read that Italians eat eel on the big day), or whether we are all going to feel Dad’s absence more acutely abroad, but something tells me it might be easier.
I am saddened but relieved at the prospect of distracting myself from all the things we used to enjoy together when Dad was here; I miss his voice booming “It’s Christmaaas!”, down the hallway on 1 December, as he forced us all to help him drag the old plastic tree down from the attic to the soundtracks of the Pogues and Noddy Holder. But removing ourselves from the Christmas backdrop that we once knew as normal may help us to lay the groundwork for new rituals.
