Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It’s at this juncture of the year, with Christmas dinner hurtling towards us, that you may well find yourself muttering: “Well, we could always go out!” Who could blame any home cook for wanting to shove this great burden on to someone else’s back, especially since every culinary TV show, magazine article and advertising break since mid-November has hammered home what a colossal faff Christmas dinner actually is. No, it’s not just a slightly posh Sunday roast with a few more guests.
Christmas dinner in the UK these days is more like a cross between dinner at Balmoral and 4 July at Mar-a-Lago. The table has to be heaving with holly-embossed crockery, the carrots must be bejewelled in star anise and Himalayan pink pepper, the turkey has to be brined in aromatic salt water and your roasties shaken in polenta and smothered in duck fat. If you’re the designated martyr organising proceedings, field-marshalling everything and cooking this tinsel-strewn palaver, it is common to try instead to divert it all to the local pub, where they’re doing “turkey and all the trimmings” for £79 a head (and including a cracker and a pre-dinner “glass of something sparkly”).
After several attempts at spending Christmas “out”, however, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not it’s really worth it. Chances are, if you’re the designated cook, as I often am, you’ll also find yourself equally burdened as the designated table-finder, taxi-booker and exasperated berk trying to get Aunt Agnes up to the Queen’s Head by 3pm, mainly because she won’t on any account miss the king’s speech, won’t eat turkey without bread sauce and would ideally like her Jim Reeves cassette played over the pub’s sound system.
Agnes’ demands will be paltry compared with those of your vegan cousin, however, or your father with Alzheimer’s who may or may not keep his trousers on for the entire meal, and, of course, the teenager in the family, who will go missing on Christmas Eve and slink in the next day at 7pm with a love bite and hot rock burns down their Christmas jumper.
I once paid the same price as a holiday in the Algarve for a two-person Christmas Day lunch at a fancy five-star hotel
Ten years ago, I shepherded the Dent flock to a local pub in the Lake District for a twinkly table beside a log fire, where a traditional big bird and figgy pudding-type menu was served. The cooking was passable – soggy parsnips, dry turkey, over-sweet cranberry and a drought of gravy delivered in stingy jugs – and the service was just about sanguine, bearing in mind that not one hospitality person in history has ever truly wanted to work on the 25th. Perhaps that’s the rub with Christmas dinner service: anyone working clearly drew the short straw.
One year, I paid the same price as a short holiday in the Algarve for a two-person Christmas Day lunch at a fancy five-star London hotel. The dining room was classily decked out in twinkly lights, all gold and bronze, and there was nothing so naff as a Christmas tree, of course, but rather posh, frankincense room fragrance and crackers that cracked expensively, didn’t have jokes but did have posh prizes such as silk scarves inside. The room was filled with unhappily married trophy wives, all plodding their way through turkey ballotine with fragments of cranberry sap – just one of 11 courses – and they kept us there for so long that the meal started eating into Twixmas. When we left, London was in a huge traffic jam , because thousands of people had driven in to see the lights, and I spent Christmas evening in a gridlock on the Holloway Road, instead of eating a Paxo sandwich while lying horizontal and watching The Vicar of Dibley.
This year, meanwhile, I have already made two reservations for Christmas dinner and cancelled them both. That’s mainly because I can’t quite commit to taking Charles out to our local bistro for the annual blowout, despite being exhausted after filming MasterChef right up to the wire, because, well, I know that, by that stage of the festive delirium, there will be nowhere quite like home.
The truth is, despite moaning about cooking Christmas dinner and the raggle-taggle bunch of family and friends who will inevitably appear with demands for a beef option because they don’t like turkey, vegan roasties and something chocolatey and stacked high with gold leaf because they don’t eat Christmas pudding, well, it turns out that I actually quite enjoy the kitchen carnage. It’s a rare moment, when the plates go down and 10 dirty pans are coped with all at once, that I feel like a grown-up, and that I’m doing something my mother, if she could see me, would be proud of – not least because I am carrying on the long line of angry matriarchs who, despite the odds, got Christmas done. You can let someone in a white hat take the strain with your sprouts and spare your angry tears, but where’s the fun in that?