December, 2006

“When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers,” wrote Karen Blixen. One of my prayers as a child was to spend Christmas day with both my parents. They were divorced when I was three. My mother, a Swede, left my Italian father for an Englishman and I was brought up in Berkshire.

This year, thanks to Ciao Bella, a book I have written about being reunited with my father, all is forgiven and my parents are coming to our house in France for Christmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

My father will travel from northern Italy with my aunt and uncle, my mother from her home in Devon. The Englishman she ran off with has long been discarded and she will travel alone. Joining the party will be my parents-in-law, who are English.

Far more pressing than the question of whether my parents will spend the whole week plotting to kill each other is the question of how to celebrate Christmas with this multi-cultural gathering.

We have been living in France for the past six years so one option is to go native. This involves a vast Christmas Eve dinner with several courses of cholesterol-attack inducing foods such as lobster, foie gras, oysters, smoked salmon and snails. That’s just for starters. It is followed by a roast bird, preferably a goose and then a bûche de Noël, a log-shaped cake made with chocolate and chestnuts. To drink we would have champagne and wine. The problem with this dinner, apart from trying to fit a goose that will feed eight adults and five children into my oven, is that it traditionally starts after the Messe de Minuit. So I will not only have to deal with tired and hungry children, but also with adults who have dangerously low blood-sugar levels due to lack of food and are normally in bed by 10pm (like me).

In France the children leave their shoes instead of stockings by the fireplace to be filled. After years of stockings they might feel rather short-changed with the amount of presents you can stuff into a pair of size two sneakers. Gone are the days when children were thrilled with a brazil nut and a Satsuma like I was. Adults in France traditionally don’t open their presents until New Year’s Day for some reason. Maybe to give French men time to buy presents for their wives as well as their mistresses.

Another option would be to celebrate a Swedish Christmas. This happens on Christmas Eve and involves eating porridge, herring, roast ham and a potato dish called Jansson’s Temptation, in that order. Pudding is a fruit salad and it’s all washed down with huge amounts of aquavit. The children open their presents on Christmas Eve in Sweden so that would keep them busy while we all eat and sing Swedish drinking songs. Drunk could be the only way to get through this Christmas, but I can’t imagine what we will spend Christmas day doing if there are no presents to open. Especially as we’ll all be horribly hung-over, an unfortunate side-effect of a Swedish Christmas. I also wonder how everyone around the table, especially my rather sophisticated aunt, will react at being served porridge as a starter.

What about the Italian option? That would make my father, aunt and uncle feel at home. The most exciting thing that happens on Christmas Eve is not the dinner (traditionally it is meat-free) but your children are asked to write letters promising to behave during the coming year. Maybe I could get my parents to write a similar pledge for the following week?

Like the English, the Italians eat their main Christmas meal and distribute presents on Christmas day. But lunch does not involve turkey. Instead I would be cooking home-made tortellini to be eaten in a chicken stock, lo zampone, which may sound glamorous but is in fact a pig’s foot stuffed with spiced minced meat and possibly lamb or capon depending on which regional Italian menu I chose.

Pudding would be a much lighter version of our Christmas pudding called a panettone, basically a cake filled with candied peel and raisons, or a pandoro meaning golden bread. I remember one Christmas I spent in Italy as a teenager. My grandmother was still alive then and she had two women locked in a little room for two days making the fresh tortellini, cakes and delicacies we were to eat. For me this is not an option, so I think the only element of the Italian Christmas I’ll go for is the panettone, which they sell in my local supermarket. If I can unwrap it before my aunt arrives no one will be any the wiser.

My husband’s helpful tip is that we give them an American Christmas and all go down to McDonald’s. “That way there would be certain to be a happy ending,” he says. “They won’t be back again next year.”

I am not English, but for me Christmas just doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t done the English way. I need to watch or read A Christmas Carol at least once, I have to eat mince-pies, I need to roast a turkey and potatoes and I crave the inevitable and mostly inedible Christmas pudding with brandy butter served to the sound of carols sung by the King’s College Choir. I’ll obviously keep a bottle of aquavit close by in case of emergencies, either to drink or bash people on the head with, but apart from that I shall be sticking to a traditional English Christmas, and I can’t wait.