The easy way out at Christmas defeats its purpose. Savour rituals... and peel those damn sprouts!

IT’S the vegetable ritual that springs to mind when I think of my own Christmas past. Probably because I always dreaded it. It started immediately after the dishes were cleared away at tea-time on Christmas Eve.

Carrots, parsnips and Brussels sprouts were all dragged out and arrayed on the kitchen worktop and it fell to my sister and me to get them prepared and ready for the pot or oven the next day.

I hated doing the sprouts. All that peeling bits off and chopping the ends and cutting an X into the bottom of each and every stalk (I still don’t quite understand why) before plonking them all into a big dish of water to keep them fresh until the following day.

For years I was the sprout girl who longed to be in charge of the carrots, a task not nearly as fiddly or time-consuming as my sprouts ordeal.

So, yes, as a young teenager, I considered the Christmas Eve sprout peeling a total pain in the neck, but I still recognised that, in our house, it was a crucial part of Christmas. Like my father getting up at 6am every Christmas morning to prepare the huge turkey and get it into the oven. That’s what you did. You put the effort in and, in the end, that was all part of what Christmas was about.

Special

Now you can buy pre-prepared sprouts. You can even buy bags of veg that you just stick into the microwave for a few minutes before ‘plating up’, as they say in the restaurant business. It’s all about convenience.

And yet, as I wandered around Marks & Spencer in Blackrock last Monday evening, looking at the array of easy options on the food shelves, I couldn’t help but wonder how busy your life would have to be that you wouldn’t have time to wrap a bit of bacon around a cocktail sausage.

Yet there they were – pigs’ blankets, as they are called – all neatly packaged and ready for the oven on Christmas morning.

‘Sure, the Christmas dinner is just like a Sunday lunch these days,’ a friend said to me recently. ‘It’s a doddle.’

And she’s right. But the point is, it shouldn’t be.

It should be special, it should involve rituals, and effort. For that’s what makes memories, memories that children carry with them all their lives. Like me and the sprouts. And then there’s shopping. Now, I could never be accused of being a shopper and yet there’s something special about pushing through the crowds at Christmas in the expectation of finding something perfect for the most treasured people in your life. About picking up that silk scarf and feeling the beauty of the fabric, or flicking through that beautifully illustrated book and knowing that it will be opened with such joy on Christmas morning.

I still wear a black, full-length furry coat that my late husband bought for me in Clerys on Christmas Eve 19 years ago.

It was a total surprise on Christmas morning when I opened the big parcel and out it fell in all its sumptuous splendour. Not only was it beautiful, it was also a perfect fit.

So how come he’d got it so right? Well, he’d wandered around Clerys in search of an assistant who was similar in height and shape to me and then asked her to try it on and parade up and down. They had such a laugh, he told me.

And now, when I slide myself into that blanket-like coat on a cold winter’s morning, as I did this past week, it makes me smile to think of that shop assistant and my husband on that Christmas Eve morning in Clerys all those years ago.

Cop-out

I still enjoy shopping for Christmas gifts despite the temptation of the online option. It’s a godsend, of course, for those who have difficulty with their mobility, or with crowds, but for the rest of us it’s actually just about convenience.

And that’s the problem – convenience is killing Christmas. The lure of the cop-out is diminishing the magic.

Early this week I posted off four parcels to England, gifts for my niece and her husband in Yorkshire, for Ruby and Layla, their young daughters, for my step-son and his partner in London, and for little Max, their toddler son.

I wrapped them with care last Sunday and, with the festive paper spread all over the floor of my apartment, suddenly, it felt like Christmas.

Then I realised I had no brown wrapping paper and had to go out and buy some – more effort required.

At the post office on Monday morning the cost of posting the parcels was an outrageous €40.

‘You’re mad,’ a friend said. ‘Why didn’t you just buy online and have the gifts delivered direct?’

Why? Because it takes away the magic. It makes it just like any present you’d send willy-nilly at any time of the year. I enjoyed choosing those presents, wrapping each of them in the appropriate paper and writing the personal message on the tags. That, to me, is what Christmas is really about.

When my son was little we used to give him a parcel of goodies on Christmas morning. He’d have his Santa presents, and then a collection of gifts from his step-father and me.

He loved the way we numbered his presents so that he had to open them in a certain order. Twenty-odd years later, I still number them. Wrapping them all individually and then numbering them is a hassle I could do without, but I do it.

It’s a Christmas ritual and something that should never be trumped by convenience.

Thoughtful

Yesterday I received a Christmas card from a friend in England. It didn’t arrive in the post but, rather, landed in my email inbox. Now, it’s stunning, and, as it incorporates two things that I love – dogs and the city of Venice – I certainly couldn’t say that it’s not a thoughtful greeting. But it’s an email.

Yes, it was more convenient than buying a Christmas card, sitting down and writing it and then posting it, but it’s languishing in my laptop and that’s where it will stay, far removed from the cards that slowly gather to form a Christmas tableau on top of my bookcases.

I hate cooking. But I’ve always loved Christmas. Which is why you’ll find me, on Sunday week, peeling those sprouts and putting that mystery X on the bottom. Oh, and opening three packets of jelly, all different colours, and melting them down, one at a time, before layering them, throughout the day, as each one sets, into a Pyrex bowl so that a multicoloured jelly is created.

It’s a bit of a marathon – in and out of the fridge all day – but I do it because my son loved it like that when he was a child. And loves it still.

Like trailing round the shops, and queuing in the post office, it’s not convenient, but it’s well worth the effort.

Why? Because it’s Christmas.