Like many of the best things in life, a good Christmas cake needs time to mature

I often think about Christmas. Not what it means traditionally and spiritually, but its place in the world and its Pagan origins. The bawdy, gaudy artifice of it. And how, in the weeks leading up to the day, it is just everywhere, and cannot be escaped.

This is good or bad depending on your point of view. I’m not really one for Boney M myself, but the Foodie’s Wife, she just loves it. But the food — the rich fruit cake, the mince pies, the turkey and the gammon, and the potatoes roasted in goose or duck fat — all of that ropes me in every time.

And talking of time, one of those delicious things needs two months of its existence before we even get to Christmas. Which is why there is a recipe for Christmas cake accompanying this piece.

I know some people hate the very thought of Christmas, but I’m one of those who loves everything from the gaudy baubles and garish tinsel to the tree groaning with decorations, fairy lights and a bemused fairy stuck on top. I feel sorry for that benighted fairy, stuffed in a dark box for a year and then having the ignominy of 12 days with a branch up her dress.

This is all in mind because my daughter Rebecca and I made a big Christmas cake last Saturday, and now it is being fed once a week, every Sunday morning, until Christmas Day. What’s more, we made it according to our own recipe, which we made up along the way, based on ratios of this to that, and that to the other, which I googled and AI-ed, also along the way.

You may think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it turned out perfectly.

By the time it was ready to come out of the oven, four hours had passed since it had gone in, and some wine, and later whisky with it. The recipe can be found here.

My household is a secular one, largely. I am the only somewhat lapsed, occasionally blaspheming Christian in it, which possibly has something to do with my High Church of England, high-dudgeon Yorkshire father only getting around to getting me baptised when I was seven years old. I suspect that all the moral damage had been done by then.

Regardless of my spiritual state at any given moment – and I have an open mind to whatever spiritual possibilities science has yet to confirm (in the spirit of believing that science is the art of the proven, only some of it hasn’t been proven yet) – I have never been tempted to let go of Christmas. 

I do have some firmer beliefs than the hope that we’re far from the best of everything:

• I believe in Santa as long as the grandkids need me to;
• I believe Christmas cake and mince pies make people smile and think fuzzy thoughts;
• I think opening Christmas presents is more interesting when everyone else opens what you have given them, than us opening theirs;
• I believe a world in which one day a year is set aside to be kind and give each other presents is better than a world without that. And that giving gifts causes people to hug involuntarily;
• I believe that good will prevail in the end. Even in Trumpland. Although the lack of empathy that passes for a Christian there right now is nothing that I recognise as one;
• I believe I will get to see my grandkids’ 21st birthdays. (I also believe it’s a good idea to believe in far-off things, because a focus keeps us going.) If I’m lucky enough to be right, I’ll be 84 – and 87 for the second one; and
• I believe the world can be better when I look into the eyes of good people. And good people there are.

Christmas behaves as if everyone does it. The first clue when thinking about this is how utterly prevalent Christmas is, in every store and often in the streets when the annual lights are turned on. And in almost every shop window, and Boney M and Bing Crosby and the dreaded Mariah Scary on the tannoy in every shop, even as early as – now – in some cases.

If you think about the Spur ranches principle – get the kids in through their parents – how can most parents get away with not buying Christmas presents for their kids, whatever their religious or secular leanings might be? Mom, dad, look at what those kids are getting! I don’t know, but I do wonder.

Maybe commerce rules more than deities do?

The UK is very secular and many churches have been turned into shops, cafés and even nightclubs. I know – I’ve been in one, in Chichester’s West Street, opposite Chichester Cathedral. 

Yet, in every British high street, fairy lights are strung up, chestnuts are roasted in barrows, choirs of angelic children sing carols around a giant Christmas tree, and for a few weeks you might think you were back in Victorian England but for the modern dress, cellphones and shiny cars. Most of those same people will not be found in church for the rest of the year, and some not even on Christmas Day. Because Christmas, on those boggy isles, has little to do with Christianity.

I remember finding just such a barrow in Chichester’s North Street one Christmas when we lived there, and a nutty aroma coming off it. I approached and, yes, here was a cheerful, rosy-cheeked man roasting chestnuts, straight out of a Dickens novel, and I bought some, and they were hot and delicious.

We bought plum puddings from Waitrose or Sainsburys, or in a poor year from Tesco, and one year we went all French and had a sort of Gallic Christmas with pâté de foie gras bought in a tin from the French market that came to town once a year. It was while living there that I got into the habit of roasting Christmas Day potatoes in goose or duck fat, which I still do today.

If a dark, rich and very fruity Christmas cake is your thing, my recipe for it is shared as an adjunct to this column. It is a very boozy one, and I know this rules out a lot of people. But it’s my family’s tradition, and that is the tradition I know best. 

Google tells me that alcohol-free alternatives to brandy or rum include orange or apple juice, black tea (for soaking the fruit in), booze-free ciders, almond extract, molasses or treacle.

However, if you’re not making a boozy Christmas cake, like this one, now is too soon to make it – best you wait till a week or two before the big day.

In the meantime, parents everywhere had best start saving up. The allure of those presents in all the stores will be hard to resist. And kids – and grandkids – can be very persuasive. DM