Merry Christmas Everyone

I’m sitting here enjoying the peace and quiet in that magical 20 minutes before your dinner party guests arrive, when the food is prepared, the champagne is chilling, the fire is crackling in the hearth and there’s nothing left to do but wait. It’s our annual Cassoulet Dinner. Every winter just as the temperature dips really low, Murray and I send out invitations to friends and neighbors to come for cassoulet. Cassoulet, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is basically baked beans that have died and gone to French heaven. It’s one of those dishes that is meant to spend days simmering on the hob in a provencal kitchen. In this case it spends days simmering in a slow cooker in our kitchen. It’s a tradition, much anticipated by all who come every year to enjoy it with us. And as I sit here, champagne glass in hand, I’m thinking of all the other traditions we hold close, most of which involve food, that help mark out the important events in our lives.

This year we lost Murray’s dad, and as sad as that was, what I remember now is the entire family sitting in our back garden every evening, all thirteen of us, eating together and reminiscing.

This Christmas morning like every other Christmas I can remember, we will slice into the first loaf of my grandmother’s Christmas Kuchen. Everything that is Christmas is wrapped up in my Grandmother’s kuchen. She made it every year, and when she passed away, my Mum picked up the torch, and now I make it for my family. And one day my girls will make it for theirs. Every time I make it I can smell Christmas, and I can see my grandmother standing in the kitchen, in her apron with the string of safety pins dangling from the bib, kneading the dough. It’s a sacred recipe, one that will never be given to anyone outside our family. It’s the embodiment of what a tradition should be, something that links past generations to future ones, and it’s at the heart of what Christmas is to us.

But there are other foods and traditions that aren’t weighted down with such gravitas; the girls have a tradition of asking Santa for a horse each year. They find new and inventive ways of asking (and spelling) but the end result is the same, no horse. For the last two years we’ve been having a New Year’s Eve fondue, because the only thing better than cheese is a giant pot of melted cheese. In fact Caroline has been making up her own version of the 12 Days of Christmas, the first verse of which is: On the first day of Christmas my Mummy gave to me, 100 pounds of cheese. It started off as 20 pounds a week ago and has been going up with each singing. Sarah has finally figured out that I’m Santa. It started out with her ‘gathering evidence’ that I was the Tooth Fairy (our note paper was the same), and then she asked if I was Santa too. I confessed, she looked thoughtful for a minute and then said, “then how do you make those sleigh tracks of the roof?” Maybe the magic is still there.

I hope the magic is still there for you too, hold on to your traditions, savor the wonder of the season, and carry peace and joy with you into the New Year.