I adore Christmas but next year I want to rein it in a bit

I used worthy icing sugar for the topping and Santa ended up with rather unfortunately yellow snow.

I’m no Grinch. I absolutely love Christmas – the corny food, the music, the champagne, the traditions, the sparked memories.

We always do a quiz with lots of shouting (this year’s from the Financial Times was excellent and my daughter won as usual) and there’s always a kitchen disco while cooking at champagne peak.

We all dress up to the nines.

But I have just written an email to myself from my Gmail to my main account, scheduled to land November 1, 2025, to try to set a standard of sanity before the full yuletide madness grips the entire nation.

This is what it says.

Dear Idiot

The shops are shut for two days. It’s not a siege situation. In fact, some shops are open on Christmas Day. You are not going to run out of milk.

Don’t do what you did last year and buy enough cheese for a Buckingham Palace state banquet. Exercise restraint.

Remember that after eating roast potatoes, roast parsnips, cheesy leeks, fatty beef and fatty-sausage meat stuffing, drenched in fatty gravy, followed by trifle with lavish amounts of fatty custard and fatty cream – cheese just might be the last thing you feel like eating. For several days. Possibly ever again.

Spend the money you saved on buying the UK cheese mountain on buying a second bottle of really good champagne. And don’t buy the special offer in Morrisons because it’s £4 cheaper, even if it is a proper appellation controllé brand, buy Veuve Clicquot, you know it’s your favourite.

Actually, get three bottles of that.

Try not to eat so much you go to bed actually groaning.

Remember this time that you have been disappointed every time with the ham recipe you have used for the last three years. Ask Bronnie for her recipe.

Don’t make a Christmas cake. It’s not mandatory. Nobody else in the family likes it and one slice is always enough for you. Your neighbour John is probably running out of ways of looking delighted when you trot over with lavish slices for him each year.

Remember that you only make it because you adore creating the forest snow scene with Santa on the top. Put those beloved vintage figurines on the trifle this year, that would be a laugh.

You don’t need Yorkshire puddings with Christmas dinner.

Buy a smaller box of Charbonnel & Walker chocolates. None of you should be eating too much sugar and the specialness of even these exquisite treats gets old when you have a big box of them.

Don’t go off piste when choosing them, feeling you ‘should’ try new ones. Just get the fondants.

Buy a red wine you already know you love to have with Christmas dinner, not a ‘special’ expensive one that turns out to be so tannin you look like Dame Maggie Smith in full Dowager Countess Grantham mode after every mouthful.

Very kindly ask your very generous darling daughter to give you just one present – and maybe one small funny one – as you want her to save her cash for galivanting.

You will never get through more than two boxes of mince pies.

Don’t feel guilty if you want to spend all of December 27^th in bed reading your Christmas book. It’s the weirdest day of the year and it’s a matter of getting through it.

Don’t forget the ingredients for the mandatory coleslaw for the December 27^th dinner. Although hopefully the ham won’t be so hopelessly dry this year if you use Bronnie’s recipe. You won’t need lube to get it down.

Go to the gym on December 28^th without fail.

This another free post

I’ve decided to do them free until the end of the year, to give more people a taste of what I do, in the hope some more of you might sign up to be beloved and appreciated paid subscribers.

Although, as I said in my last missive, I do understand that we can’t all sign up to every Substack we like, so if you’ve enjoyed this, but already have enough Stacks on the go, perhaps you would like to ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ instead? A one-off tip.

It does make me feel a bit like a busker asking that, but one of the things I’ve learned about Substack is that you have to be honest about what you hope to get out of it.

There’s no point pussy footing around trying to be subtle about it. I make my living as a writer, the end.

So picture me on a street corner strumming my guitar, hat on the ground, except my tunes are made of words.

* Dear treasured Paid Subbies - I hope you don’t feel peeved. It’s only a few days and then things will return to normal, with exclusive content in return for your very gratefully received support, with an occasional free one to share the love.*