Christmas Day

Posted on 2007/12/28 13:03:49 (December 2007).

[Tuesday 25th December]
As noted in yesterday's entry, when entertaining guests over the festive period, in many ways Christmas Day itself is the easiest one to manage - it sort of carries itself with its own momentum. As long as there are presents to open, you cook a reasonable meal and have plenty of booze on hand (as well as the telly to fall back on when there isn't anything else happening) you can't really go wrong.

We didn't get up particularly early (given that the average age of the occupants of my flat this morning was somewhere in the upper 40s this isn't that surprising), and after a simple breakfast we set about opening presents over a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Presumably this tradition of drinking champagne whilst opening presents is to encourage more animated responses and heartier thankyous.

Despite there only being the four of us we managed to take quite a while over opening our presents, and following that and the usual Christmas morning phonecalls, it was already time to start thinking about cooking.

Duck had been chosen for the meat eaters (which I put Chie in charge of, what with me having neither the knowledge nor the inclination to cook meat properly), as we thought it would be something of a faux pas to give our guests avian flu - and besides, no-one seems to actually like turkey anyway. In addition to this we had all the usual trimmings - roast potatoes, stuffing, roast parsnips, brussel sprouts, red cabbage with port and redcurrants, broad beans, carrots, two different gravies and of course cranberry sauce.

Given that meat was involved cooking took a fair old while, and so we didn't eat until some time after 3 - although I believe that is fairly typical on Christmas Day. I had forgotten that we didn't have a microwave, and that Christmas puddings take an inordinately long time to cook by any other means, so there was a long gap between the main course and dessert, albeit punctuated with a cheese course (I personally prefer to have cheese before dessert rather than after anyway). I went the whole hog and set light to the Christmas pudding (using whisky rather than brandy) - Chie was very concerned about this so it didn't stay alight very long, but I enjoyed this little bit of frivolity nonetheless.

The remainder of the day then passed in that typical Christmas day evening overfed haze. Once the mountain of washing up was done I sat down with a wee dram, feeling rather pleased with myself.

Again,don't believe him folks about the waking up - I was awake at 7, as always, but couldn't get in the room to see if Santa had had his booze and mince pie and the reindeer their carrot.

Posted by John's Mum at 2007/12/28 23:02:34.

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