Stanley Tucci

‘As an Italian Catholic family, we ate only fish on Christmas Eve. My mother’s cooking was elevated to even greater traditional culinary heights’

Each year as the days grow shorter in England, where I have now made my home, I cannot help but miss the winters of my childhood, appallingly more than a half a century ago, in upper Westchester New York. Our home on a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill was surrounded by trees, which by early December were almost always laden with snow. The ponds and lakes would begin to freeze over and the woods around us became studies in hard black and soft white, making them wonderfully mysterious and more inviting than ever.

I loved everything about winter and I loved Christmas in particular. Ours were joyous celebrations that I still attempt to recreate.

Although my parents’ funds were little more than limited, they made sure that our house was always elegantly decorated. My father, an artist and art teacher, had constructed a modernist manger out of scraps of walnut wood in which sat contemporary figures of Mary, Joseph and the Christ Child. Over the years other more traditional storebought versions of shepherds, wise men and farm animals somehow made their way into our stable, but they always seemed to me to be unsophisticated interlopers. Each year when this homemade presepio (Italian for Nativity scene), the Christmas tree lights (the large, primary coloured, hand-painted variety), the stockings and other decorative holiday bric-a-brac were freed from their crumbling cardboard boxes, I felt an almost overwhelming surge of joy.

As an Italian Catholic family, though now very un-practising, we ate only fish on Christmas Eve. Homemade food from recipes passed down over many generations was our daily fare but during Christmas this practice was elevated to even greater traditional culinary heights. My mother, an extraordinary cook, would prepare a meal similar to the one that follows:

After this gustatory excess – and during the years we still believed in Santa Claus – my two sisters and I would assemble a plate of carrots for his reindeer, as well as cookies and a shot of Scotch for Old St Nick. Although bits of cookies and carrots remained, the Scotch glass was always empty. What a coincidence that my father was and still is a Scotch drinker.

Christmas Day brought yet another feast either in our home or at the home of my father’s relatives. The food rivalled that of the night before with timpano (a drum made of pastry filled with pasta, meatballs, salami, eggs, cheese and ragout) as the centrepiece.

For me, Christmas always brought at once a palpable sense of excitement and a profound feeling of comfort. However, what was most significant was that the entire spirit of life was also altered. For this limited period of time, people were somehow capable of exhibiting kindness, courtesy and a generosity of spirit not normally seen throughout the rest of the year. (This was most evident during my many years living in New York City where people’s abruptness or rudeness was replaced with an old-fashioned politeness, almost courtliness, until the day after New Year’s Day.)

Although I can never recreate those Christmases of my youth, it is my hope that someday I, and all of us, will evolve to the point where we behave as we do during Christmas all year round.

Stanley, 59, is an actor and director, best known for roles in The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games