Turkeys are toast — this Christmas let’s eat, drink and be merry with festive fayre people actually enjoy

Susannah Butter
Daniel Hambury
WEST END FINAL

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This year, it started with a text. “Do we have to roast a turkey this year?” asked my mum, the Christmas anarchist. “How about we have something we all like instead — burgers?” She hasn’t processed the message that I’m trying to eat less red meat. Then there’s a friend whose children are terrified that she will repeat last year’s performance. She went full Anna Jones with a vegan Christmas feast, because nothing says eat, drink and be merry like kale. Even the so-called pudding was sugar-free. They cried — all they wanted for Christmas was a traditional turkey dinner. Clean eating has no place at the Christmas table.

There is a Last Supper mentality to Christmas dinner. So much emotional energy goes into planning the menu for this one meal that you’re practically burning off the calories in your roast potatoes by fretting about it. And this year the UK is more divided than ever with only half of us eating turkey. Let them eat Ottolenghi cauliflower cake, as they say in North London.

Vegetarians are thrilled. They’ve endured decades of inquisition from narrow-minded family members who see Christmas as a carnivore’s festival and think it’s original to ask questions like: “So you can’t even have pigs in blankets — how can you enjoy Christmas? Would you like a side of bacon with your nut roast? Remind me, why don’t you eat meat?”

By now, it’s too late to change the menu. Birds have been ordered and if you thought discussions about Brexit stockpiling were hysterical, visit my local Waitrose where the shelves have been pillaged for pannetone and staff are braced for shortages and scuffles over the last pomegranate (Nigella says they are essential at this time of year).

A traditional turkey dinner
Pixabay

I blame the same people who force you to meet up before Christmas; even though everyone is so knackered they can barely manage a conversation and you’re seeing each other in January anyway. It’s this sort who send breezy texts saying: “They’re out of the stilton I like at Tesco, you couldn’t be a Christmas angel and bring some could you?” forcing you to schlep from shop to shop hunting it, like Mary and Joseph searching for a room at the inn.

But actually, the most memorable Christmas meals have been the ones where you don’t find the stilton you think you need, and break all the rules. Robbie Williams says his dream Christmas dinner is biryani. There was the year a friend’s Indian mother tried to roast a traditional turkey, panicked that it was too bland and added spice, resulting in a festively red tikka turkey. It was delicious. Last year, a friend faced her first Christmas without her father. She and her mother found the idea of turkey for two too sad so they wrapped up warm, packed a picnic and had Christmas dinner on the beach. Much better.

You schlep from shop to shop in pursuit of the perfect stilton, like Mary and Joseph searching for room at the inn

Yesterday, Waterstones released a seven-second public service announcement video about wrapping — there wasn’t enough paper so they suggested rotating the box. Hey presto, it fits. The same goes for Christmas dinner — if the shop is out of the gorgonzola you always buy or your daughter has gone vegetarian, change it. So mum, you can have a burger for Christmas.

But I still want roast potatoes.

Laura Dern stars in two marriage stories

Two of my favourite films of 2019 — Marriage Story and Little Women (out on Boxing Day, I saw a preview) — have overlapping themes. Both explore repressed female rage, and question how marriage can restrict freedom (“I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my canoe,” says Jo in Little Women).

Note that Marriage Story’s director Noah Baumbach is going out with Greta Gerwig, who made Little Women. She was pregnant with their son, Harold while making it. Expect friendly rivalry during awards season.

Hair is everything in both films. When Nicole leaves her husband in Marriage Story she cuts her hair and goes blonder as an act of defiance.

Laura Dern
Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Her ex hates it, but his opinion is now irrelevant — she’s liberated. In Little Women, Jo’s hair is “her crowning glory” — cue tears when she nobly shears it off and sells it to support her family.

And Laura Dern steals the show as both the unashamedly voracious divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and as the most feminist incarnation of Little Women’s Marmee I’ve ever seen.

The rise of "Selfie Wrist"

There’s been a rise in carpal tunnel syndrome because we’re taking too many selfies, contorting to find the most flattering angle. And this vanity comes at a price — “selfie wrist”. I’m painfully familiar with tech-induced injuries — I regularly drop my phone onto my face scrolling through Twitter in bed. I blame politics, that’s what I’m reading about, but actually my social media addiction is far more troubling.

At a carol concert this weekend I risked burning down an 18th-century church by trying to juggle candle, hymn sheet and phone, all to take a snap for Instagram that I could caption “it’s lit”. Luckily the younger generation think selfies and having a WhatsApp picture are uncool. They’re savvy enough to reject it, saving their wrists and their sanity.

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