Olia Hercules
Growing up in secular Soviet Union, south of Ukraine, Christmas was forbidden. My family never celebrated it. We put up our tree and opened our presents on New Year’s Eve, instead.
But, when I was 10, in post-Soviet 1994, for Christmas, my family decided to take a pilgrimage to the tradition-laden Western Ukraine, a thousand kilometres away. We took a 16-hour train to get there, to discover our roots.
We arrived to visit friends of friends on Christmas Eve. We were dropped off at a train station, in an outlandish location of dreams. For the first time, I saw a hill covered with a forest of Christmas trees with sparkling snow crystals.
It was the mountainous area of the Carpathian Mountains.
The friend of friends met us at the train station and said: “It’s not a long walk to the house, but there are no buses to take us there.” We said: “OK,” thinking it would take 10 minutes.
Wrong. Little did we know, people who live in the Carpathians were used to walking or skiing everywhere. The “short walk” took an hour and a half in heavy snow.
Exhausted, we finally arrived at a huge wooden house by a gushing brook, the sound of wolves howling in the distance. Inside, we were rewarded with a real traditional Ukrainian Christmas, full of colour. Guests wore beautifully made goat masks, violins were played and people were singing. The house was warm and cosy, with a roaring fire we stayed up by late into the night. We ate a traditional pescatarian feast: a mushroom borscht with wild mushroom-filled dumplings; varenyky filled with potatoes and curd cheese; local trout; soft, yeasty buns called pyrizhky, filled with cabbage and prunes, and sweet ones filled with sweet poppyseed paste. It ended up being the most memorable Christmas of my life, and I long to recreate it.
Stevie Martin
While in most homes the giving and receiving of Christmas cards is a declining tradition, in our house – for my sister and I at least – it has evolved into a furiously fought competition. After the presents have been pored over while sat on my parents’ bed (I’m 30, my sister is 27, and we refuse to do it any other way), we give out Christmas cards. The rules are you can’t buy it from a shop, you have to make it yourself – and the loser has to make an extravagant breakfast.
Gina, my sister, is an incredible artist. One year, she painted a picture of my parents. Another, she sketched an incredibly lifelike Father Christmas. Years ago, I figured out that I could win by making my parents laugh, seeing how little I could get away with. An A4 sheet of paper with a pine needle stuck on it using Sellotape above the words “HAPPY PINE-MAS”. Another year, I dribbled some gravy, drew a smiley face on it and dubbed the mess: “the gravy nativity”. Last year was blank, to represent the Holy Spirit.
The only issue with this – apart from the fact that my cards get more traction than Gina’s, despite hers taking hours to create and mine taking roughly three minutes – is that I don’t know where to go after 2017’s blank card. It feels like I’ve reached the pinnacle of not caring. Do I give them no card? The world’s tiniest card? I suppose the only thing to do is go the other way – hire an artist and create an A0 canvas. Please pray for me – I’m terrible at making breakfast.
Tom Duggins
As a vegetarian, Christmas sometimes feels like I’m under siege from otherwise well-intentioned friends and family who want to sneak meat into my food. If it’s not the yearly cry of “hang on, which gravy did we put the meat juices into?” (this tends to come mere seconds after covering my plate in the stuff), then there’s always the pleasure of arguing with my mum about whether the roast potatoes have to be cooked in goose fat or not. (No surprises on my position: olive oil and spuds go together like being vegetarian and only having one thing you can order on a menu.)
That’s why, come 25 December, I like to focus on those parts of the traditional Christmas lunch that we can all get behind. Once the main course and pudding are all done with, there’s the vegetarian haven of the cheeseboard to look forward to.
It’s like a culinary after-party taking place on your very own kitchen table. No one’s sneaking any sausage meat into the chutney or injecting pork grease into the soft cheeses and there’s no awkward discussion about who can have what, it’s just gorge time at the table and everyone’s invited.
Christmas lunch tends to stress people out – getting the timings right is tough and there’s a lot of pressure overall. But with the cheese course, you’re ready to go in about five minutes: minimal effort for maximum satisfaction.
Hayley Campbell
As far as I can tell, our only family Christmas tradition is pushing our oversized heads into too-small Christmas cracker hats until they split. We never wanted this tradition; it was never planned. We have tried everything to get rid of it, short of having our skulls shrunk in questionable science experiments – such as balancing the hat on top of our spherical skulls and just not moving for the rest of the dinner, turning very slowly to address others at the table, the top of our bodies moving like Batman locked into his batsuit. But nothing works. The hats still split in two, or they topple into the gravy. It is an inevitability that we have given up dreading and merely succumbed to. If it’s just family at the table, we will turn the hats until the split is obvious, like a badge of big-headed honour. But we collectively fear work Christmas parties and being invited to Christmas dinner at other people’s houses. What if they make us put on the hats?
Combining a creamy crumbly texture and mouth-watering garlic and herbs, Boursin is a welcome addition to any festive buffet – and a versatile soft cheese for your party season cooking, too. Discover a host of inspiring recipes at boursin.co.uk/MerryBoursin
