The inventor of the fairy light should be knighted. This year their humble bulbs are doing much heavy lifting. This being a year that progressed at the speed of dark, its days crawling into one another and sitting there for a while as if out of puff on a park bench before plodding onwards to complete the week, poorly. And it was for this reason that I made the executive decision to start Christmas in October. Fairy lights are clambering up my cacti, around the fireplace, along picture rails. They flicker at all times, regardless of migraine. Electricity bills, ozone be damned, they are the lights by which we breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. They are the lights by which we homework, fight and cook. They are the lights by which we make up, sourly. On they cheer, little fireworks celebrating our small flakes of achievement – hitting the high note in Silly Games, successfully applying our cat’s flea treatment, remembering to wash a PE kit.
This, remarkably, is the first year I’ve done Christmas decorations and honestly I’m kicking my Jewy self, for the illusion of raw joy they bring is very fabulous. Fairy lights were my first seasonal indulgence. A gateway drug to the darker pursuits, of three-bird canapés and the occasional heating of a Heston. This year there is not a Christmas-themed food I have not either tasted noisily or fingered distractedly in the supermarket. Prosecco crisps. Could I? Should I? All cynicism that in the past may have flavoured my approach to the annual displays of cranberried meats was swallowed many months ago, and now each evening meal has been a little Christmas dinner, courtesy of such welcome touches as Waitrose’s lobster vol au vents, served as supper. The kettle boils merrily before being lovingly emptied over a Sainsbury’s pigs-in-blankets-flavoured Pot Noodle, garnished with Tesco’s pigs-in-blankets crisps. A dusting of Marks & Spencer’s pumpkin spice seasoning sprinkled over your porridge? Your chips? Why not?
Seriously… tell me. Tell me why we shouldn’t allow ourselves a little joy as we pump porked fuel into these terrible machines we’re burdened with. Do we not deserve a treat? Do we not deserve a treat every hour until it’s late enough to go to bed? Tins of festive Fortnum’s biscuits intended as presents have long been eaten, but festively and with more goodwill than any gift ever got. If an item can be injected with gingerbread or chestnut, then glazed somehow and sprinkled with crumble then, by God, let it be. Let it be.
There was a time when I may have dipped a finger into a puddle of Sainsbury’s new pigs-in-blankets-flavoured mayonnaise or honked a glass of glittery gin and rudely announced that the taste reminded me of sharing a fag with an off-duty Santa, or the leftovers from an office buffet whizzed up in a dirty blender, or the air that hangs low after a terrible fire at the chicken farm. I may have chomped down a novelty crisp and shrieked that the flavouring was so salty it gave the illusion the crisp had claws and was desperately trying to escape my throat. It’s possible I’d have tried a delicate sliver of some truffle-soaked cheese and recalled in rhyme the smell of the “accident room” at my daughter’s first nursery, or bitten into a novelty stollen and cursed disgustingly in Spanish.
I am no longer this person. No. One benefit of this year that refuses to end, continuing long after we have all politely started putting on our coats, is that I can now enjoy such treats as Aldi’s 2m-long pig-in-a-blanket. The terminal decadence of mulled-wine-scented toilet paper honestly thrills me. If the inventor of the fairy light should be knighted, then the guy who first realised you could Christmasify anything just as long as they had enough cinnamon in the cellar, and that simply by stencilling a snowflake upon the packaging of a bit of fish they could elevate it to sybaritic celebratory feast-food, well, make them mayor. A sausage taller than me! What mad genius dreamed of such a thing?
Hush you, with your “Actually…” reply about a marketing team in an air-conditioned board room. I choose life! I choose to imagine a chef with a tragic backstory, forever searching for the recipe that will recapture the taste of Christmas. I choose to imagine a test kitchen deep beneath a snowy forest, where crisps bathe in champagne and the smoke from smouldering pine cones rises to suffocate a salmon, but ethically.
It’s dark now, but for the twinkling fairy lights that add a drunken mystique to my otherwise filthy kitchen. It occurs to me briefly that I may have hypnotised myself with their flicker and that in searching wildly for something to look forward to I have settled for… this, dancing down the aisles of Tesco as if I’m about to marry Santa, and medicating with “merry berry” scented wall plug-ins. Oh well! I raise a glass of mulled-wine bleach to all your various healths, and wish you the merriest Christmas a person can buy.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
