After years of striving for the perfect family Christmas, with garland-festooned staircases and elaborate table decorations, Debora Robertson asks if the time has come to embrace a simpler holiday season
My cooking year: November
I was sorting out a bookcase yesterday and found two Martha Stewart books from the Nineties. They’re both about how to achieve a stylish Christmas and they imbue decking the halls with the same sense of joy as an emergency colonoscopy. There are double page spreads on the various merits of 12 different kinds of foliage suitable for wreath-making; elaborate table centres made from gumdrops in the form of topiary trees; tips on gilding walnuts; and four pages on a tree trimming party which looks about as laid back, spontaneous and jolly as a royal investiture. For sustenance, there are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – fine – but with the crusts cut off and bells, candy cane and bauble shapes cut out of the top slice to expose the jewel-like perfection of the homemade jam beneath. It’s all trying VERY HARD.
Looking at these books now makes me feel tired, but once I loved them. Back then – newly married, keen to make new traditions, for everything to be perfect – I saw them as manuals, but today they read like social anthropology text books examining the arcane traditions of a forgotten tribe.
Christmas has always been a time when we indulged in more, better, finer. We have the Victorians – most specifically, Prince Albert – to thank for creating what has become the modern iconography of Christmas, from elaborately decorated trees, to greetings cards and jolly old holly-berry-red Santa Claus himself. But even they could not have anticipated the bacchanalian excesses that were to come.
Before my Martha obsession, I remember marvelling at shoulder-padded 1980s features about Candy Spelling, wife of Hollywood producer Aaron, mother of actress Tori and a too-much-is-never-enough Danielle Steel heroine come to life. Spelling Manor in LA’s Holmby Hills could be the reason the adjective ‘sprawling’ was invented (seriously, look it up!).
Christmas chez the Spellings included miles of garlands and staircases lined with waiters dressed as toy soldiers. Most thrillingly of all, Candy had a wrapping room filled with ribbons and papers in every shade, a hymn to festive excess. You know you’ve made it when you don’t have to turn the house upside down after midnight mass
