Are you someone who likes to try at least five new recipes on Christmas Day, or do you stick to tried-and-trusted favourites, knowing there’ll be uproar if you go beef instead of turkey – or if bread sauce isn’t on the table? Clare Finney looks at why December’s celebrations evoke such strong emotional attachments
hall we cook something different this Christmas? It’s a question posed most years in the run-up to the big day. Recipe books are pulled off the shelves, food magazines like this one are pored over, and the family WhatsApp group lights up with impassioned debate. Rarely does anything new make it onto the festive table in my family, mind you, as the traditionalists hold sway over the pioneers. There may be some experimentation during December at get-togethers with friends and extended families. From Christmas Eve onwards, though, the menu is immutable. But why are we so wedded to the traditions of the feast?
PAGAN ROOTS
Let’s begin by turning back time – not just to childhood, but to the time when Christmas wasn’t Christmas at all but a pagan festival marking the end of autumn and the start of winter. “This time of year has always been significant. You finished harvest, you saved the best bits. It’s the darkest, most dangerous time – and you fought that fear with festivity,” says Kaori O’Connor, a social anthropologist at UCL London. “The great Christmas festival as we know it is grafted onto that.” Many things we consider peak Christmas – the holly, the ivy – “are symbols ensuring fertility or protection from evil spirits. That feeling is deeply embedded”. So it’s no surprise, O’Connor continues, that so many of us feel Christmas is both a homage and a harbinger. “You can remember your life by Christmas meals,” she says – yet the festival brings with it the feeling that “if we do Christmas right, everything will be all right with the coming year”.
Food writer Gurdeep Loyal can relate to that sentiment. As a second-generation British-Indian, Loyal’s family Christmas has feet planted in both identities. “It’s a risky thing to be adventurous at Christmas because you’re so precious about the emotions and the nostalgia. You don’t want to gamble on something new.” If you roll the dice on a new dish and it’s a good Christmas that year, then great, you may well make it again. But such is the pseudo-religious power of our ‘perfect’ Christmas meal that, if that dinner is less raucous than normal, you’ll probably blame the food.
IF IT AIN’T BROKE...
“I never experiment on Christmas
