First off, I have to say that I like Christmas. I’ve liked it for the past fifteen years, ever since I left Luxembourg and was spared the ordeal of having to celebrate with my dysfunctional family. Well, I haven’t celebrated with the family for twenty, but it took five years to cure the post traumatic stress. One thing I did like about Christmas dinner in Luxurybourg was the complete absence of turkey. Now here is one mostly useless bird. It is simply too big to roast. If the breast is nice and juicy, the legs are so bloody, they are still twitching and once the legs are cooked, the breasts are so dry you can clean windows with them. My friend Brian is the only person I know who consistently manages to produce a truly outstanding bird, but then he brines it for a decade, slow roasts it for 48 hours and then blow torches the skin into crispness (or something similarly involved). All of this is fine and dinde-y (bad pun) if I’m doing it at Frangi, but at home, I just want to stick the thing in the oven and go for a drink.

And that brings me back to dinner with the family and the pheasant my mother invariably roasted. Preceded by frog’s legs with lashings of butter, parsley and so much garlic it would have made a Frenchman faint, it was a feast to remember. The other memorable part was my mother. Christmas always makes her vociferously aggressive. The simple fact that no dinner can ever live up to a Hallmark Special drives her to an insatiable blood lust that even the garlic can’t cure. Recriminations, tears and aunts running through the snow in their rather too tight cocktail dresses, pearls scattering into the night, all of that was quite commonplace. In fact after a few years of this I didn’t even bother to wait for the end, when everyone would sit down to dinner, the women with mascara streaking down their faces, the men as drunk as they could decently get, exchanging long suffering glances and my mother, a triumphant glow lighting up her face, knife dangerously poised in hand, asking whether anyone would like a piece of breast? By that time I had normally changed the Christmas carols that were playing for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (much better suited to the mood of the moment), taken a leg off the pheasant, packed one of the better bottles and run off to a friend’s house.

Every year since I’ve left, my delusional mother calls and asks me whether I don’t miss those wonderful Christmases at home with the whole family and whether we couldn’t do that again. Maybe next year?