Prue Leith reveals how she fills her home with festive spirit in our sumptuous new series

With any luck, God and Boris willing, this Christmas will be joyous and erase the sad memories of last year. Children will be taken to the panto, churches (and pubs and restaurants) will be open and welcoming, and we can revive the traditional family Christmas.

Certainly, I’m hoping to do that. Last year we’d just moved into a new house but hadn’t yet sold the old one down the lane, so between them we could accommodate everyone. We’d planned a last hurrah to say goodbye to our home of 45 years, and to celebrate our new house. Then, with just days to go, we were in lockdown again.

I’d ordered a 20lb turkey and forgotten to cancel it. But all was well: my husband John and I had a wee roast duck, and the staff at the local care home (for whom I was cooking Friday night suppers) got an awful lot of turkey pie.

I’ve always loved Christmas, mostly I suspect because I am naturally bossy and it allows me to be the Queen Bee, making sure Christmas runs like clockwork. Well, that’s always the plan. But when I think of Christmases past, the disasters loom large.

 The time a nephew inadvertently turned off the oven after making his breakfast fry-up and, when I opened it at lunchtime, what should have been our slow-roast Christmas dinner was stone cold and raw. 

Or when the dog ate the ham, or the time I thought deep-frying chestnuts would make peeling them easy, and I didn’t slit their skins so they exploded like fireworks, spraying hot fat all over the kitchen.

Once I served prunes soaked in port for pud. I’d decided, since they were already so soft, not to cook them, which meant the alcohol was undiminished and, since we’d already had Champagne and wine, we all got drunk as lords. 

Then there was the year we had a Nativity play and I had the bright idea of bringing our donkeys into the Nativity scene. One ate the straw in the crib and the other peed on the floor.

Yet we all have glorious memories of Christmas too. Of going carol-singing with the children dressed as kings on the donkeys and me leading my horse-turned-camel (thanks to a cushion-filled hump). Of making snowmen in the days when we got serious snow in the Cotswolds. 

Of everyone stirring the Christmas cake mix and making a wish. Of the children shouting up the chimney to Father Christmas with impossible demands. Of ‘games night’ for grown-ups – mostly charades and a lot of booze.

Every family has its Christmas traditions and mine may well not resonate with yours, especially as mine are particularly old-fashioned and traditional because they started in the mid-70s and continued uninterrupted for 20 years, with my brother and sister-in-law coming to us one year and we going to them the next.

Since then, with our children grown and with families of their own and with their own in-laws to consider, the alternate-year tradition has broken down. And since between us we now boast 16 grandchildren and counting, getting all of us together would be impossible, even if we had the beds.

Moving house had me briefly deciding to junk our old Christmas decorations. Not least because our new modern house has no mantelpieces to drape swags (garlands of greenery that taper at each end) under. I had thoughts of starting afresh with cool new objets from some expensive design shop. 

I actually put the boxes into the skip, but then suddenly I couldn’t bear it and I fished them out again. So this year, once again, we’ll dig out the ancient tree ornaments (some of them made by my children 40 years ago when they were six).

Once more we’ll turn their old rocking horse into Rudolph by giving him antlers and a sleigh made from a wheelbarrow, and we’ll fill it with presents. I’m too impatient to wrap gifts beautifully so tend to buy pretty wallpaper, which is expensive but not as pricey as individual sheets of paper. 

If it’s pretty enough it doesn’t need anything beyond sticky tape to finish the job. We’ll pile these into Santa’s sleigh. But this year, for the first time, we will have something new, modern and cool. 

We’ll have Siobhan Miles-Moore’s amazing pottery bowls (milesmooreceramics.com) as our main table decoration. In fact, the bowls live on the dining room table because I can’t bear to put them somewhere out of sight. 

People think they must have candles sitting inside them because they glow so deeply, but it’s just the gilding inside catching the light.

HOW I DECORATE MY HOME

Apart from for the Christmas tree and the Sweetie tree (see next week’s Weekend), I don’t think you need much in the way of decoration other than masses of holly with lots of berries. And maybe a bit of ivy to stick over the pictures or trail across the table. If nature lets us down on the berry front, you can buy fake berries or shiny red baubles and remedy her failure.

Don’t let getting the house decorated become too big a deal. Yes, your visitors will be impressed if you have transformed the whole place into a festive wonderland with a magnificently decorated tree, Christmas cards strung up on ribbons and garlands over every picture. 

But the truth is they won’t even notice if you’ve confined yourself to a couple of poinsettias on the table. I love to decorate the house, but it’s selfishly more for my pleasure than anyone else’s.

If fussing around with ribbons and pins, secateurs and spray paint isn’t your thing, forget it. If you like to trim the tree once the grandchildren arrive so they can have a hand in it, don’t let the fact that the little ones will abandon a task halfway through or fail to clear up when they’re done get to you. The thing is, did they enjoy it? Was it fun?

Here are some of my ideas:

• I like making wreaths or swags with a mix of real holly and ancient baubles and hanging Christmas cards on wide vertical ribbons. If strung on horizontal strings, cards are all on their sides. Doing it this way means the pictures are the right way up, and the wide red ribbon looks properly Christmassy.

• You can use a sprig of holly between the roast turkey’s legs to add that festive touch.

• You can also use holly to finish off a Yule Log. Any Swiss-roll-shaped cake will do. I like to make a flourless chocolate roulade (good for my gluten-intolerant stepdaughter). Cover the cake with chocolate buttercream or ganache, stick a ball of cake-trimmings on to the cake to make a ‘knot’, then cover this with icing too. Mark the whole thing with a fork to look like bark. Add a couple of sprigs of holly and dust with icing sugar for snow.

• Use fresh holly (not plastic!) to ensure a crackling flame on top of the Christmas pud – the oils in the holly leaves are highly flammable! When you’re ready to go, with the pud turned out on a serving plate, stick a sprig of holly in the top. Warm a couple of tablespoons of brandy in a small saucepan. Don’t heat it too much, not above finger-hot, or the flames could take your eyebrows off. Carry pud, matches and warm brandy to the table. Get everyone’s attention. Light the brandy in the saucepan and, standing back a bit, pour it over the pud.

• Holly is great for candle decorations. I use shallow bowls, fill them with fine sand, damp the sand so that the holly will stay looking glossy and fresh and plant holly and candles into the sand which will keep them in place. Add a few shiny baubles if you like.

• My only other table decorations are the napkins, which look festive if folded into a triangle then rolled, points upwards to fit the inside of the glasses. I like to put my place-names in between napkin and glass, because they’re easy to see and don’t get moved about by guests wanting to change the placement. If young Malcolm doesn’t want to sit next to old Aunt Maud, tough! It’s your shout.

• For the suggestion of a tablecloth without the bother of laundering and ironing one, how about rolling a runner of coloured wallpaper down the centre of the table?

IT’S ALL IN THE PLANNING

It’s easy to say, ‘Keep cool, don’t get stressed,’ but somehow Christmas seems to wind one up. In my family, becoming tetchy and quarrelsome used to be called ‘Feeling Christmassy’. 

I was a caterer and restaurateur and December was our busiest month. By the time Christmas Day dawned, I was fit to be tied. But, always over-ambitious and wanting everything to be absolutely perfect, I’d be up wrapping presents until 3am on Christmas Eve… and my husband’s remark that children don’t care about the wrapping and would be just as happy with their presents in a bin bag would madden me.

But over 50-odd years I’ve learned that some things are more important than perfection. No one is coming to judge your cooking for a Michelin star, and no one will give a hoot if dinner is half an hour late or the salad is forgotten in the fridge.

They’ve come to you because they want to be with you and with each other. They are there in the expectation of a joyous time, full of goodwill and laughter. If you’re exhausted, overwrought and stressed, that ain’t gonna happen.

However, there are ways to avoid much stress and aggravation. One thing I learned early on is to make a Christmas Day plan and stick it on the fridge door. I follow it slavishly. If I have people coming to stay and I’m feeding them for longer than just Christmas Day, I will make a more detailed one with items like:

Ages Before: make the pud; make and ice the cake.

Xmas Eve: peel the spuds; make the bread sauce.

The Christmas Day plan will be step-by-step timetabled instructions from turning on the oven to serving the flaming pud. 

Without a plan to follow, it’s just too easy to spend the day vaguely anxious that you should be doing something and not being quite sure what. But you can follow a good timetable like a zombie. Even a few glasses of fizz should not upset the flow.

You just need to make sure there are breaks built in for you to have some fun too – to join the presents-round-the-tree, go to church if you like, walk in the park, whatever. There’s nothing worse than feeling abandoned to slave over a hot stove, while you can hear the sound of clinking glasses and much merriment from the sitting room next door. 

Which brings me to the other golden rule. Decide what jobs you need not do yourself, such as take out the rubbish, lay the table, clear away the crumpled gift wrap and peel the spuds. Then tell your chosen workers what you want them to do and when to turn up to do it.

And make sure the last line of your plan states ‘EVERYONE ELSE TO CLEAR UP!’ in large enough letters that even a 14-year-old boy will notice.

When, at last, the children are in bed and the grown-ups have collapsed on the sofa, it might be a good idea to have selected (and found and downloaded) a few good films to watch. It is such a waste of precious free time to spend it channel hopping aimlessly, quarrelling about who gets to be in charge of the remote and if you should be trawling Netflix, Amazon Prime or Apple. 

Once upon a time there wasn’t much choice and half the nation settled down to watch James Bond – again – every Christmas. But now the choice is massive. And maddening and confusing. 

So what about doing a bit of pre-planning, agreeing on a handful of worthwhile productions, say a couple of films, a documentary, a concert? And allocate time to watch them. You could even lay on the popcorn. Or mince pies! 

FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS

Source