ALL the usual old articles are beginning to appear in papers and magazines. 'How to survive Christmas', 'A survival guide to Christmas', 'You can manage Christmas without having a nervous breakdown and hiding in the under-stairs cupboard for three days'. I made the last one up, but you get the gist. It is something which is beholden to we who put pen to paper, or finger to computer keyboard these days, to write this sort of article even if we really want to scream 'get a life, it's only two days, surely you can survive that?!' Every publication I've ever worked on has deemed it necessary to inform its readership on the dos and don'ts of planning festive celebrations and every publication has deemed it necessary that I should write these words of wisdom on the single ground that I'm a woman and ought to know. It is the penalty for nearly always working in an all-male environment. So each year, like clockwork, I would attempt to get into the spirit of the occasion and warn people of the penalties of not defrosting the turkey properly, tell them never to leave the peeling of chestnuts until the last minute unless they wanted brown hands covered in puncture marks, and that making a little cross on the bottom of sprouts is totally unnecessary. And other words to that effect. My advice was always somewhat down-to-earth, in direct contrast to the up-market magazines with their glossy pictures. I decided quite early on that my readership wouldn't necessarily be worrying about folding napkins into swan shapes or whether it was the done thing to eat fruit with a knife and fork. No, they were more likely to want to know how long would they have to defrost a 25lb turkey on Christmas Eve, having ignored my last year's advice about the length of time it will take (days) or whether it was safe to stuff it because they'd just read somewhere that stuffing a bird was liable to lead to food poisoning if the bird wasn't completely defrosted. So I would dish out words of wisdom yet again on the inadvisability of immersing a bird in a bath of hot water in the vain hope they could eventually prise open its legs far enough to wrench out the giblets. Over the years only the arrival of new ingredients, new techniques and different sorts of vegetables changed the advice. One year a famous chef advised detaching the legs of the bird, stuffing them and cooking them separately and then cooking the rest of the bird on its own. Suddenly everyone was doing this, and wanting to know if they should re-attach the severed legs afterwards or leave the bird legless on its platter. Personally I had enough to do on Christmas day without becoming an orthopaedic surgeon so my legs stayed close to, but not adhering to, their previous owner. New vegetables often puzzled people. What should they do with mange tout? My advice is that while mange tout picked out of the garden is fine, the packets of imported ones, which have probably sat on a banana boat for several weeks, are tasteless and nobody eats them. Chuck them in the bin and stick to frozen peas. The same goes for those tiny immature sweetcorn whose only merit is that they are crunchy but tasteless and to a certain extent imported green beans. As well as festive advice you can always write the 'Countdown to Christmas' bit. Depending on how much space you have this can begin where you want it. 'July, buy all your Christmas gifts in the sales, wrap them with the cheap paper you bought in the New Year sales and store them in the attic. Don't forget to attach labels on them so you know whose is whose.' 'November 31, try to remember exactly where you put the Christmas gifts in the attic without having to unpack 23 boxes.' By the time Christmas Day arrives you can do the hour by hour countdown, with a little bit of poetic licence. 7.15am (or any time from 3am if you have small children) leap out of bed ready to face the day. Or, in reality, 7.15am, crawl out of bed with supreme hangover wishing you'd never drunk that final Creme de Menthe cocktail at 11.15pm last night. 8am, give a merry call to the rest of the family to tell them that the home made pancakes and maple syrup are ready. Or, wait for a bleary eyed snappy household to emerge, all regretting the Creme de Menthe and none wanting to be within sight or scent of a pancake, grilled bacon or a festive sausage. And so it goes on. Midday, turkey should be nicely browning, stuffed in all possible places. Veggies should be prepared, starter in fridge, all washing up done. Countdown to 2pm meal on the table seems very realistic. This isn't counting every child and some adults feeling slightly sick because they've been at the Quality Street tin, every corner of the house filled with wrapping paper, bits of toys, crazy cats running around the wrapping paper, unwise glasses of sherry, and everyone congregating in the kitchen while cook is trying to decant a stubborn salmon mousse and wants privacy while she disguises the missing bits with cucumber. Or, everyone isn't in the kitchen and has left cook to her own devices while sounds of carousing can be heard from other rooms and cook feels abandoned and savagely throws a slightly burnt saucepan which housed the slightly burnt apple sauce into the sink and floods the floor. You can't really countdown to Christmas because life gets in the way. I have two pieces of advice to those who feel they can't survive another festive feast. The first is a surefire solution. Change your religion. There are plenty of other religions which don't have any kind of feast day anywhere near December so you can happily ignore the tinsel and spend the whole day doing what you normally do and eating steak and kidney pudding. Political correctness forbids me from handing out suggestions on what religion, but there is always a good choice. Political correctness also leads me to say that this is a light-hearted suggestion and probably shouldn't be taken seriously. Although it also works if you want to get rid of annoyances on the doorstep, unless they have the zeal of conversion lighting up their eyes in which case slamming the door works equally well. My second, more mundane tip is, make good gravy. If you succeed at nothing else on Christmas Day you should be able to turn out a superb gravy which will cover a multitude of sins. It's surprising the number of people who can't make gravy at all, and quite often you can't find recipes for it in cook books. If you equip your children with nothing else in life, do teach them the wherewithal to produce a passable gravy Posh chefs call it sauce or jus, but I'm talking about good old fashioned full of meat or poultry juices gravy. Gravy which is just thick enough to cover the food but thin enough to pour. Gravy which doesn't consist of the sprout water and a handful of gravy granules. Nor should it need carving out of its jug. Gravy is an art and needs just as much care as the rest of the meal. Made properly it adds to the meal and the sins it covers range from dried up turkey (or any other meat), overdone vegetables, stuffing which you unwisely made by including that rather ancient packet of dried sage which smells like the bottom of a very old chest of drawers and any part of the meal you forgot to add salt to. Heated to boiling point it can also disguise the fact that you are no good at getting all the many different parts of the meal ready at the same time and that all the root vegetables are cold, the sprouts tepid and your sausage balls decidedly icy. So, good gravy and lots of it, can be the saviour of any meal. Mind you, it won't save you if your Christmas pudding is like a lump of lead but here we could probably bring another good old British stand-by into play. Custard. You can keep your brandy butter, which will melt on top of a lumpen pud and do nothing to disguise the little mistake over the amount of flour you put in. And don't go bothering with fancy foreign custards which need stirring carefully over boiling water lest they curdle. You have no time for that kind of thing. Just open a tin of Bird's Eye custard powder and reach for the milk. My own problem now is, having written about Christmas this week, what on earth do I write about in the next two weeks? Please pass the gravy!
