Christmas feasting

When it comes to food at Christmas, in addition to the foodstuffs usually eaten – mince pies, turkey, Christmas cake – another traditional feature is the amount of food consumed. We expect to spend more money on food, to have our kitchen cupboards and fridges full to bursting and to eat so much that our New Year’s Resolution yet again has to be to go on a diet and start going to the gym.

On the one hand, in a society where an increasing number of people are forced to use foodbanks to survive there is something rather distasteful about this excess. But on the other, I can appreciate the desire to celebrate and be festive through foodly extravagance.

The excess of Christmas produce is often documented in literature. In probably the most famous work of English literature about Christmas – Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) – the miser Scrooge, who is converted to a generous appreciation of the joys of Christmas through the machinations of three ghosts, sends a huge turkey to his employee Bob Cratchit which he gleefully notes is ‘twice the size of Tiny Tim [Cratchit’s youngest son]‘. Earlier, when Scrooge is visited by the second ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Present, his dull, bare home is transformed into a Christmas scene of luxury and plenty, including an abundance of food: ‘Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were 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, and seething bowls of punch…’

This device of listing to convey the amount of Christmas food is also used by other writers. In The Mill on the Floss (1860) George Eliot focuses on the ending of the meal with the different pudding options. This food is seen from the perspective of Tom Tulliver, beloved brother of the protagonist Maggie, who is home from school at the end of term. He notes that this Christmas does not feel as happy as normal, but there is reassurance in the fact that the food is unchanged: ‘the plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever…;…the dessert was as splendid as ever with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light and dark of apple jelly and damson cheese‘.

Christmas as a time of family reunion is also a theme in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). William, the eldest son, has moved from Nottinghamshire to London for work, and his return for Christmas is eagerly anticipated by the family, not least the mother, Mrs Morel, who throws herself into baking: ‘There was a big plum cake, and a rice cake, jam tarts, lemon tarts, and mince pies – two enormous dishes. She was finishing cooking – Spanish tarts and cheese-cakes.’

In comparison to these works, my output this year has been rather modest: mince pies, sausage rolls, stollen and the annual Christmas Cake. But hopefully there’s enough to be festive and share with friends and family, but not too much to tip over into excess. As the narrator in The Mill on the Floss notes, the joy of the Christmas season is not felt everywhere: ‘His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless – fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance; where the human faces had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.’