Debora Robertson

Food and features writer

Growing up, we were very much a make-your-own Christmas family, with enthusiastically glued together paper chains and snowflakes cut from white paper. My parents used to make a festive dinner on Christmas Eve, not because they are from countries that follow that tradition, but so we could slummock about in our pyjamas the next day and play with our toys.

Next door, the Wilsons’ house was bedecked with the finest Woolworths could offer. Abundant fat loops of tinsel snaked up the stairs and gold foil bells hung from every light fitting. Advent candles and those little brass carousels of tiny, twirling, tealight-powered angels held twinkling pride of place on every surface. I think there was even a menorah, which was quite unusual for a Catholic household in Seventies Co Durham.

It was a cinnamon-scented paradise to me.

The Wilsons are perhaps responsible for my own, deeply rooted love of an over-the-top Christmas. When I moved to London and bought my first minuscule flat, the Christmas tree I bought filled half the sitting room.

When I got married, our first Christmas together was a tableau vivant of every Christmas film I had ever watched.

I kicked off the festivities with a drinks party for our neighbours on Christmas Eve, followed by Midnight Mass (where found ourselves singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing behind Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and his very pretty girlfriend because, welcome to east London), then we had 14 of our dearest beloveds for lunch on Christmas Day, and afternoon tea on Boxing Day for practically anyone else I have ever met in the very social history of my life.

Since then, I must have made a million mince pies, gently rolled hundreds of pigs in blankets, boiled a barnyard’s worth of hams and basted several dozen turkeys. The concept of “from scratch” is big with me. “That’ll do,” and, “Do you think this is too much?” are words that never pass my lips.

For many, when you partner up with another human it opens up a world of new festive traditions. I would love to say this was the case with me, but I am afraid I am such a control freak, I have never spent Christmas day at my in-laws’ house. They have come to our house many times, but I am that Christmas monster who can’t relinquish the reins of the feast.

Also, when we first got married, I asked my newly minted husband what his family did on Christmas Day and he said they snuck on to the local golf course and all thwacked a few holes together, which struck me mute for a moment with the chilly grimness of it all. Why would you possibly do that when you could be having chocolate for breakfast and pouring out the first glass of something delicious?

So what I have allowed him to bring to the feast is his family recipe for bread sauce. That is quite enough, thank you.

In the past couple of decades I think, I hope, I have struck the balance between special and slummocking around in pyjamas.

Christmas begins for me a couple of weeks into December, when we trek to Columbia Road flower market early one Sunday morning to collect the biggest possible tree we can find from Shane and Yvonne’s stall.

Later that same day, our friend Nick comes over to help my husband fix the two-metre-wide neon Christmas puddings to the front of the house. (Too much? Not enough? In the spirit of the season and of full disclosure, I have been looking for a neon roast turkey for years.)

I might tie together some of the branches from the bottom of the tree – of course we always have to cut loads off the trunk because what seems just right in the middle of a market stall looks like a gift from the people of Norway for our assistance during the war when you get it into the dining room of a London terraced house. I tie them with an exuberance of ribbon and hang them on the front of the door. Let the festivities begin.

After that, there is cooking and drinking and writing of cards (I still send them, don’t report me), present buying and wrapping, parties and cocktails and torturing high heels that looked great in the shop, Christmas jumpers and carols and tearing up to Fairytale of New York, dogs with ribbons on their collars, children in party dresses and tiny waistcoats for best, glugs of booze sloppily poured in hot chocolate, mince pies and gingerbread men for breakfast.

And naturally during all of this, we all still pretend to work and look halfway presentable, concealer and caffeine and Berocca doing the work of heroes to get us all to Christmas Eve.

And then there we are. All work done. Or you would think, wouldn’t you? But no. I always end up with things to do at the last minute, largely because of cocktails and terrible shoes (see above).

So on Christmas Eve, after everyone else has gone to bed, my favourite Christmas ritual begins. My husband and I, just us, side-byside in the kitchen, chopping, peeling, sautéing and par boiling, making the same gentle jokes we make every year, making the same food we make every year.

We break into the champagne meant for the morning and listen to whatever the local talk radio is wherever we find ourselves. Slade and Chris Rea are interspersed with softly drunk people phoning up to talk about Christmases past, what it all means to them.

It is sometimes sad, almost always sentimental.

And each year I am struck, my hands in the sink or halfway up a turkey, that Christmas evolves as our lives do, the faces at our tables change, we add more chairs and take some away, and that it is really a season to cherish what we have, which is each other, whether that is one person, or the whole Christmas choir.

When I bought my first flat, the Christmas tree I bought filled half the sitting room