How to Make Everyone Happy at Christmas and Why Would you Want to? A Guide for the fanatical home maker!
As usual Christmas is rolling around at phenomenal speed again. It doesn’t seem two minutes since you packed away the decorations and again the silly season is upon us. From October many of my friends, female and male, start a slow burning obsession with Christmas. You start pumping the children for information on things they would like and start making list after list. You look at TV listing for the latest celebrity guide to perfect Christmas cooking and watch the news with horror as yet another Christmas disaster unfolds before your eyes.
I have no idea when Christmas became such a “must get it right” holiday. Who decided that it must be perfect? I didn’t. Not once did I sit down and decide that it was my responsibility that Christmas had to be perfect. I know we all fondly remember the Christmas Eve I fell down a drain and still cooked Christmas dinner on crutches. Even in agony I couldn’t pass my responsibility for a perfect Christmas to anyone else.
Is the superwoman complex I suffer from a modern invention? I’m not so sure, because I know my mother suffered from the same complex. Happily prostrating ourselves upon the alter of family Christmas year after year, hoping for the recognition of a job well done.
That is why we take it personally if our little helpers forget to prick the lids of the mince pies. I can still remember my mother, the most reasonable of women, reducing my sensitive elder sister to tears after one batch of the obligatory mince pies looked like they were wearing top hats.
Some of my happiest memories are of childhood Christmases spent with my family. My mother shone at Christmas like the star at the top of the tree. The woman who for fifty weeks of the year was an intelligent business woman and competent housewife became the basket case perfectionist foundation on which our family Christmases were built.
I myself have cooked Christmas dinner heavily pregnant and still suffering from morning sickness. I still couldn’t relinquish any control worse still I invited the whole of my husband’s family for Christmas dinner. Could I sit down and let my perfectly intelligent husband do the cooking? No, not me!
Share with us the absolutely mad lengths you have gone to the make everyone happy at Christmas. I know there are others out there for whom Christmas may come but once a year and if it was twice a year we’d all be basket cases.
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Hi Crunch
Like you, I become superwoman at xmas – though not through choice! mainly to make sure everything is done how i want it. I personally have never gone to too much extemes. However……………..
A friend of mine spent all morning cooking a turkey xmas dinner with all the required trimmings only to have her partner return from the pub absolutely blotto after have 1 too many xmas cheers/ pre lunch apperetifs and flake out on sofa. Then have her 4 year old daughter request tomato ketchup to douse over her perfectly cooked lunch.
She was not too impressed i can tell you!
BTW tried out your choccy cake recipe – turned out great and tasted even better.
Hi Sian glad you liked the cake. I will be posting more recipes soon. Ah the tomato sauce stage kids are just so cute. My eldest once threw sunday lunch over me because I’d cooked it just for her and she wanted a sandwich just like mummy. Happy days she is now a veggie teenager who demands serparate meal as her due.
Crunch