Christmas here

Lovely, and not the same

December 2025

I’m one of those people who adores Christmas. I love all the preparation and paraphenalia.

Thing about Christmas though, is that it’s better if you do it the same every year. I’ve been having the same Christmas Day for half a century.

My siblings and I follow basically the exact same Christmas Day routine. It starts with stockings (pouring Smarties into mouth from tube: optional). We make the same lunch – with notable exceptions: Rob doesn’t like brussel sprouts, my sister and I do; I always make bread sauce, everyone else gives it a miss; Rob and Dawn make the mince pies from scratch and I buy them, repeatedly and in bulk, from Woolworths.

In the morning (after stockings), we exchange pictures of Mum’s-pork-and-sage-stuffing-in-progress on the family WhatsApp group. Rob is particularly good at chippolatas rolled in bacon. My sister Liz is the acknowledged queen of baking. Her Christmas cake is soaked with brandy over a period of weeks.

In America, things are different. I don’t like it. May I count the ways?

No pork bangers.

We are a family from the North of England. We were raised on sausage meat. Sausages for breakfast, sausage sandwiches in our lunchboxes, sausages and beans with toast, bangers and mash with peas, sausages and chips with peas, mini sausages at parties … sausages are our meatballs. They are our steak and our chicken. They are our heritage and our lifeblood.

Over here, sausages are sold cooked. Not unlike viennas for hot dogs. In airtight packages. Reddish “Italian sweet” sausages are popular. I buy “roasted garlic chicken sausages” and fry them in the pan to brown the outsides. (It’s not the same.)

At Thanksgiving, I searched for uncooked sausages for my stuffing. Nothing. There was no sausage skin I could slit with my pointed knife. I bought stuffing mix from the butcher. It was mainly bacon.

Another matter: Fruit mince.

How can a country this big not contain a shelf, somewhere, of fancy minced fruit? (My mother long ago forbade us from buying Safari. It was Woolworths or nothing – but I’d gladly buy M&S.) Without fancy minced fruit, how is a woman to make mince pies?

Buy some, you say.

Good luck with that. I haven’t managed to locate a single box, not even online. (Also, I was burned by the whole ‘hot cross buns for Easter’ fiasco. I pre-ordered some from a famous bakery. Oh dear. The buns were a yellowy brioche-meets-pannetone. They were squeezed together in a foil dish. There were no raisins or currants or sultanas. There was a bit of peel. There were no crosses, there was no glaze. What almost made me cry were the hashtags of piped white icing slashed across the top of the whole. They didn’t even hashtag the buns individually.)

I could make my own fruit mince. I have a Nigella recipe. But where would I find currants, sultanas and peel? For that matter, where would I find Holsum vegetable shortening for the pastry?

I hit similar hurdles when it comes to homemade Christmas cake and Christmas pudding. American grocery stores stock “raisinettes” – child-sized snack packs of raisins – and other dried fruits, like cranberries, that lend themselves to a trail mix. The baking sections here are heavy on chocolate chips, thin on fruits of the vine.

Honestly, it could be terribly upsetting, if you were prone to fits.

A normal-sized chicken for roasting is called a “young chicken”. Everyone roasts turkeys – for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The debate used to be “brined or unbrined”? These days people deep-fry. It has to be done outside, and there’s a special machine, but people swear by the crispiness without, the tenderness within, the speed – and the freeing up of oven space.

Sounds good but I’ll never do it.

I can’t find an uncooked gammon.

I’m rather proud of my gammon recipe. I boil the joint in a liquid that’s part fresh-squeezed orange juice. The glaze features marmalade, honey and wholegrain mustard. There are cloves everywhere. My gammon (via The Hairy Bikers) is the reason my husband keeps me around.

At Thanksgiving, I was obliged to serve a wildly expensive “ham” that was terribly salty, in addition to being unglazed. There was no layer of fat. The meat held its shape when you cut it. That’s no good. You want it to be so moist it flops at the knee.

That’s enough complaining.

There are some Christmassy things over here that I would gladly – permanently – fold into our December routines.

“Hot cider with alcohol”.

Obviously, to us, cider is always with alcohol. Over here, cider means pressed apple juice. Therefore, a hot cider with alcohol is hot, cloudy apple juice with a tot of liquor.

I had one at a cold “Holiday Market”. It saved my life. That drink felt like what I’d been dreaming would be in the St Bernard dog’s barrel as I lay on the snowy mountainside fighting for my life.

Mulled wine is excellent also.

These drinks don’t work as well if you aren’t shopping in sub-zero temperatures, with an evil wind whipping between the stalls. But when you are, they’re lifesavers.

Wreaths.

I’m sold on them.

Seasonal wreaths for your front door are massive here. In Spring, the wreaths are celebrations of pastel-bright blooms. At the start of Autumn, there are rings of yellow, orange and red leaves (and pumpkins lining the steps). In December, the holiday wreaths are like Christmas trees: curves of evergreen foliage, deep-red berries, acorns, pinecones and plaid bows.

Obviously, there’s no point to wreaths in South Africa. Because of our high walls, there’s no yard decorating culture.

Front yard decorations are a delight.

I’ve seen giant, inflatable snowmen and a pathway lined with giant candy canes. Splindly, lit-up groups of reindeer are popular on front lawns. Hedges are netted with Christmas lights. Strings of bulbs spiral up even the tallest trees.

Our neighbourhood newspaper, the Burleith Bell, awards prizes every year for the best yard decor. Some houses decorate three storeys up.

People send each other Christmas cards in the post.

Imagine. Just imagine getting real Christmas cards pushed through the post slot in your front door for a month.

Family portrait Christmas cards don’t beat a six-week holiday, hot beaches and outside feasts. But how lovely. (We’ve been getting our landlord’s Christmas cards for two years. Just the quality of the envelopes is a marvel. And seasonal stamps! We’re keeping all of them safe.)

I’ve saved the best for last: Tiny villages.

My friend, Maura, makes three tiny villages every year. She always starts work on October 1. She uses only paper, cardboard and metal (no plastic, no ceramics).

One of her villages is centred around a Christmas tree farm (with a reindeer landing strip alongside). Another has a ski slope, complete with chair lift. One has a town square. It’s framed by the grand town hall, shops and the new library / theatre complex.

Some of Maura’s buildings and figures are very, very old. Her mother inherited handmade, wooden Erzgebirge houses and characters from her German mother-in-law. She started collecting, and Maura inherited a quarter of her mother’s mini treasures (Maura is one of four girls).

Of course Maura has since added to her collection. She is especially keen, naturally, on original Erzgebirge pieces and other originals of the same style and vintage. She is a great lover of Putz houses, lightweight minis made in Japan out of paper and sold cheaply in the US the between the wars.

I told Maura I’d seen a lot of Christmas ‘minis’ at my local charity shop. I’d seen hand-painted, light-up houses. I’d bought a set of dear little handpainted Christmas figures (that look like extras in the street scenes of period Christmas rom-coms). Maura said some of them were Department 56. They’re stamped underneath, and each one has a model number. They’re handpainted and collectable.

More than a year ago, I bought a tin of teeny weeny wooden tree ornaments that Maura has now identified for me as Kurt Adler modern ornaments made in the style of the German Erzgebirge miniatures.

She told me that the tradition of mini villages started with the fashion of setting up a circular toy train track under the tree.

Incredible! She said it and I could picture it immediately. I must have seen trains under trees in movies. Electric trains, sometimes.

The tracks led to stations that led to villages that led to towns, Maura said.

I was in Madrid once over Christmas and I was stunned by what was available to expand your nativity scene: painted backdrops of mountains, villagers, animals and all manner of objects like fences and trees. I was particularly impressed with the tiny vegetables for stocking a market stall.

I’ve been dreaming of tiny white Christmases ever since.

Minature Christmas scenes are so retro: one can imagine children playing with them in December before the age of screens.

They’re also popular because of the weather. So many Christmas traditions make sense in the cold. It’s dark and it’s cold so we retreat inside to eat and drink. Inside, we play at tiny villages and sing carols. We switch on the Christmas lights mid-afternoon because it gets dark at five. We sip egg-nog and fill the house with the smell of Christmas cookies.

I’m not having egg nog.

I have already had many Christmas cookies though, and I’ll definitely dress the family in ugly sweaters again on the 25th.

Next year I might hang a pickle on the tree for good luck.

Ha! No, I shan’t.

Happy holidays, as we say over here. (Sam doesn’t like me to post pics of him.)

Have a great day and have a mince pie for us. We’ll have a candy cane for you.