YVETTE PARSONS – Educators actress

“My favourite tradition is baking the cake. I’ve made some good ones, but I’ve never been fully organised to make one far enough off from Christmas for it to mature with rum and that sort of thing. More often than not I’ve made it a night or two before Christmas Day, but I love being up all night making it, when the world, and the house, is quiet. I put on some music, pour a glass of wine or Baileys, roll my sleeves up and get to work.

I do find that in my experience Christmas opens up huge opportunities for disasters big and small, mainly to do with preparing the dinner. One of my ex-husbands brought the turkey home on Christmas Eve and put it in the fridge manfully. I found to my dismay the next day that he’d ordered the most gigantic turkey I’d ever seen or heard of. By the time I realised, it was too late to get it on the table at a reasonable time of either the day or night. We all sat around for hours waiting for it to be roasted, and my son fell asleep at the table before it was even served.

A disastrous Christmas, or rather a lucky one, depending on how you look at it, was when my fridge caught fire in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. Luckily, I was up doing a marathon bake-off and I was awake and in the kitchen at the time, so I was able to put it out. I smelt burning and when I went to investigate I saw a flame coming out of the back of the fridge. I was able to beat the flame out and turn the fridge off, but I’d not normally have been awake at that time. If it hadn’t been for the fact I had all the Christmas baking to do for the next day, the fire would have built while I was asleep and it would’ve been a disaster.”