In early November, the nice woman at the checkout of my local Sainsbury’s pointed out a nearby stack of Baileys. “Just £10 a bottle,” she said, with a cheery wink. “Proper bargain.” I smiled thinly. She clearly had no idea what sort of a person I am. Baileys? In November? Don’t be so disgusting. Baileys is for Christmas. The annual bottle comes into my house on 20 December and not a day earlier. Because Christmas is a time for traditions, and the pre-Christmas bottle of Baileys is one of mine. I am stone-cold certain it is exactly what the Baby Jesus would have wanted. Why? Because I say so.
The word “tradition” is solid and reassuring; the things that word refers to are often rather less so. To mix our cultural references, the point is best made by Tevye in the opening song to Fiddler on the Roof. “You may ask, how did this tradition start?” he says, having introduced the audience to his fellow villagers. “I’ll tell you – I don’t know. But it’s a tradition.” Indeed it is.
I was told a lovely story recently about an adult daughter who, taking on the mantle of Christmas food prep from her mother, went to the considerable trouble of sawing the end off the ham’s bone before boiling it, just as her mother had always done. The mother asked her daughter why she had bothered. The daughter cited family tradition. At which point the mother explained that she’d only ever got out the tools because she didn’t have a pan big enough for the ham, unless she sawed off the bone.
We may want tradition to be mystical and ancient but in truth it’s all just a sweet confection. Take turkey. Really, take it. For many decades, until shamelessly subversive food writers came along with their fancy alternatives to the big bird, serving a turkey on Christmas Day was as important a part of the festivities as little donkeys and believing in the virgin birth. And yet as the food historian Dr Annie Gray points out, it was Dickens’s A Christmas Carol which established the bird’s primacy. “Before that, while turkey was popular, beef was far more so. The working classes had goose and the upper classes had more than one sort of meat.” Then Dickens presented an ideal of the feast, while glossing over a significant problem. The poor Cratchits wouldn’t have had an oven in which to roast the gift that Scrooge had given them. Like the rest of the community, they would have relied upon the baker to roast their bird and by Christmas morning the baker would have shut up shop. Oi! Scrooge, mate! What are we supposed to do with this huge bloody turkey?
We should not see any of this as undermining our sense of tradition. We should see it as liberating. Because if tradition is exactly what we say it is, then like my bottle of Baileys – other Irish cream liqueurs might be available, but why would you? – we can just invent our own. And they can be as mad and as, well, untraditional as we like. Do you want to mark the arrival of Christmas by knocking up quinoa and avocado tacos? They sound truly awful but it’s your Christmas, not mine. Go for it. Why not serve a beef rendang, or fire up the pizza oven and bake a margherita with the nativity scene lovingly depicted in tomato sauce and grated cheese, or whip up a vat of butterscotch Angel Delight for dessert? And if anybody asks you why, just stare at them in disbelief. Then whisper, because it’s Christmas. And it’s a tradition.
