LAST- MINUTE XMAS GIFTS
Forgot some gifts? Head to the kitchen rather than the shopping mall ...
Each Christmas, my friend Prue makes a huge batch of her delicious tomato chilli jam, which she puts into jars with pretty labels and gives to all her friends. Louise, another great friend, makes wonderful potpourri crafted from cones, dried bay leaves, dehydrated slices of oranges and lemons, seeds and seed pods she has collected over the year, sprinkled with a combo of essential oils ( a mix of oil of cloves and orange creates a very Christmassy scent). Mel makes jars of her yummy savoury seed cracker mix, ready for you to add oil and water to, roll out and bake, with the recipe hand- written on a small card and attached with a neck tag to the jar. Brona makes cherries in pinot noir syrup. These are all such lovely signature gifts, and every year I hope I haven’t fallen off the list of people lucky enough to receive them. The makers are very happy to share their recipes and methods, but actually, it’s much nicer to be given a jar or tin or box of whatever treat these thoughtful friends have made.
I can hear the collective chorus of dismay wailing out around the country — “You must be bonkers. No way!” — when I suggest you fit some time in your overloaded schedule between now and Christmas to make some yummy treats for Christmas gifts.
But just stop for a second — by the time you have negotiated the traffic to the mall, found a car park and emptied your credit card on random and possibly irrelevant gifts, you will likely have spent an exhausting amount of time and way more money than you ever imagined. And that’s without even thinking about the emotional drain of having to deal with everyone else’s stress out there in Christmas Shopping Land. The preChristmas madness is the stuff of nightmares.
The thing about making a gift — be it a jar of homemade jam, pickle, chutney or preserved lemons, even perhaps a little box of sweet candy or festive biscuits — is that you have to be present, engaged, in the moment. All those zen things we do when we meditate — well, now you can combine them simultaneously with solving the problem of Christmas gifting. Even better, you can make just one thing and lots of it, so the effort gets amortised over five or 10 or more presents. Win- win, I say.
And if you can’t quite get to that, I suggest you take a cue from Allison Pearson’s character Kate Reddy, a hedge- fund manager and mother of two in the novel
I Don’t Know How She Does It: go buy yourself some nice Christmas mince pies, pop them in the oven and strategically burn them. Not enough to be inedible, mind, but to the point they could never imaginably have come from the store. Put them in a little box with a ribbon and no one will be any the wiser. As for the recipe that everyone will nag you for — ah, well, that’s definitely a well- guarded family secret.
Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas!