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My partner, Charles, being of French stock, has campaigned for a swankier Sud de la France yuletide for some years. Or, to be precise, ever since he ate his first spoon of Paxo sage and onion stuffing and gasped: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?!” Truth be told, it was a tough question to answer. Flavoured gravel that reminds me of Santa bringing a Sindy caravan set? The taste of Silent Night played on a recorder?
Certainly, it was the taste of Christmas when my parents were both still alive, but since they left, I’ve felt increasingly like Miss Havisham each Christmas season. You will recall her in Great Expectations, in her tattered gown, by a dusty wedding buffet, suspended in time and waiting for a party that will never happen. That’s me, but in novelty antlers with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and trying to keep the dream alive. Look, I’ve bought Bailey’s and a marzipan stollen, and I’m putting a layer of swiss roll in the sherry trifle. If I go through the motions of putting rum butter in the fridge and Quality Street on the sideboard, then it’s business as usual, isn’t it?
Well, no. Each year, since my parents’ deaths, the returns have diminished and some serious truths have to be faced. No amount of joining the Christmas supermarket scrum in late-December to locate bread sauce or crackers will recreate the sight of my mam’s hands on the trolley. We will never again laugh in an NCP car park at 6am while on a dawn mission to find posh coleslaw. When my father died, so did my love for festive slabs of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut in its shiny purple wrapper. Sure, I can eat it alone, but it will never be 1988 and he won’t be next to me, posting chunks of chocolate into his mouth while drinking Bulgarian vin de table, wearing a wonky paper crown and listening to his new Traveling Wilburys album. The party is over – or, at the very least, it’s time I made some new memories.
In small French steps, over the past few years, elements of a trad Noël have crept into our house. First with oysters, a bigger focus on lemon and dill confit salmon, and many small, plump, whiffy cheeses, and then with homemade marrons glacés, AKA chestnuts stewed in sugar syrup for about 80 hours. Life is too short to glacé your own marrons, and the results remind me of huge clumps of ear wax, but I’m addicted all the same.
The French Christmas hypermarket experience, which we’ve done in some recent Decembers, is quite exhilarating. I’ve found myself loading up on Lanvin chocolate escargots, which are essentially like a Quality Street green triangle but in a delicate, snail shape and in a sleek, white box. All cheap French chocolate is, I hate to admit, far classier than our own. Those Ferrero Rocher “prestige praline” gift sets with coffee and cherry options? Bliss. Those bags of Revillon Papillotes? A far superior version of Mars Celebrations. I feel guilty for saying this, as if the ghosts of my Christmases past feel betrayed by my no longer caring for orange Matchmakers.
Last Christmas morning, I watched in bemusement as Charles and my scouse sister-in-law Tam scoffed liver paté with pain d’épices. Then, later, everyone preferred Charles’s beef rib with a vadouvan rub, which he’d made as an alternative to my traditional dry turkey. But so long as turkey was still on the menu, alongside slightly stewed sprouts and cranberry gloop from a jar, well, a bridge to the past still remained.
This Christmas, however, I am experimenting with – deep breath – letting France take over completely. That had mixed results for the UK in 1066, but on a personal level it will certainly spare my emotions. If the French contingent sources Christmas in various online deliveries, I can spend more time on Duolingo and brushing up on phrases such as “Certainement, je suis rassasié” (I am full) and “Bah, d’accord, je vais finir cette boîte d’escargots.” I can work on a classic bûche de Noël, which was just called plain old chocolate log when I made it in home economics in the 1980s, but the French seem to treasure it.
More importantly, if I go fully French, it will spare me standing in the supermarket and hearing my father’s favourite Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie over the in-store speakers, which still feels like a cheery punch to the windpipe every December while I’m stocking up on tonic water. I won’t need to find that sachet of Colman’s bread sauce, which no Dent has wanted since 1991, when Great Aunt Beat died, but we still bought every year out of duty. It tastes like salty wallpaper paste. When people die, they live on in our hearts, but the truth is, at Christmas, they often live on as heartburn, too.
Even so, I will still buy a small bar of Fruit & Nut to eat during Carols From King’s on Christmas Eve, just in case a passing spirit fancies a chunk. It’s stupid, it’s sentimental – but some things will be for ever.
