Laura Craik on the idiosyncrasies of festive feasts

Never mind on which date you put your tree up — yawn — the more contentious date is when you do your Christmas food shopping.

‘I’VE BOOKED MY OCADO SLOT!’ friends keep crowing, like Christ himself has risen clutching a turkey crown. Sorry, but I refuse to pay £9.99 to get my food delivered any time after 20 December. At 7.30am on Christmas Eve, you’ll find me parking badly outside M&S in Camden Town, poised to bagsy the strawberry trifle that reminds me of my childhood, along with 641 different types of vegetable, because they want carrots, Brussels sprouts, parsnips and garden peas, while I — the normal one — want broccoli, asparagus, edamame and baby corn.

The baby corn is a contentious subject. So, too, is the duck. We always have duck because its epic fat content renders it scientifically impossible to cook it dry, even if the cook is me. Crispy duck might have as many calories as a deep-fried Mars bar, but what price moistness? Only three ingredients are needed for a perfect Christmas: love, succulence and the ability to taste everything by miraculously avoiding the flu. Oh, and prawn cocktail, truffled brie, cheap champagne, pungent Rioja, cranberry-topped pork pie, a giant ham cooked strictly to Nigella’s instructions, some bogging liqueur featuring salted caramel because salted caramel never seems to become passé however much it ought to, pigs in blankets, pigs not in blankets, vegetarian pigs in vegetarian blankets and mock duck for the eight-year-old. ‘No duck for me, mummy,’ she has already announced. Great. All the more for us, hun.

Everyone has their bonkers Christmas food rituals. One of ours is to queue all morning at La Fromagerie, even though we could pre-order online. Where’s the fun and free brownies in that? Another is to buy something from as many small, independent shops as we can. Alas, our love of dodgy liqueurs wasn’t enough to save the magnificent Grape Sense, offie of dreams next to Chalk Farm Tube. Shop cannily, shop heartily and if you can, shop local — nothing tastes as good as supporting small businesses feels. Apart from roast potatoes.

Red Cardi-ed

In the red corner, there’s Summer Bunni and Cuban Doll. In the blue corner, there’s Cardi B and Offset. In the yellow corner, there’s everyone else with monikers that don’t sound like they were created by some algorithmic rap-name generator — but let’s forget about us and focus on poor Cardi, who has split from Offset, after Summer Bunni revealed she cheated with him because she ‘didn’t know how serious the marriage was’. Is the Unserious Marriage a new genre, or am I just out of touch? Can one marry flippantly? Maybe one can. The pre-Christmas break-up has always had an extra piquancy — RIP, Love Island’s Jack and Dani — and never more so than in the era of the straight-to-camera confessional Instagram video: see Cardi’s recent post for a masterclass. Stay strong, B.

Goodwill to all

The amount of money I spend at this time of year makes me feel sick, and also guilty that I have the money to spend at all, when so many people haven’t. This guilt is the most heinous of #firstworldproblems, the emotional equivalent of caviar in a year when universal credit issues have left some families so badly off that they

can barely put food on the table, much less presents under the tree. It costs £3 to buy kids fleeing violence a bath toy (refuge.org.uk), £5 for a stocking-filler from the NSPCC (nspcc.org.uk) and £10 to donate to the Metropolitan Police’s Embrace Child Victims of Crime appeal (met.police.uk/christmastree). At Christmas, charity doesn’t have to begin at home unless you’re on the breadline.