Christmas is a time to stuff your face, right? It’s a time to load your plate with a few too many slices of ham, turkey, and beef. Some (and by some I mean my Uncle Steve after 5 glasses of wine) may even step so far and say that ‘Christmas feasts are concepts invented by mass food disseminating conglomerates to effectively sells more turkeys.’ But I’m pretty sure that Christmas feasts have existed since the Constantine era (post Russell Crowe Gladiator times). What were these mass food conglomerates then? What did they even eat around that time? Raw grains, beats and beans? Whatever the food, Uncle Steve’s logic would lead me to assume that they were way too keen on selling them.

Food-related conspiracy theories aside, Christmas is fucking great. It’s a time to eat and drink yourself into oblivion and watch your drunken relatives do embarrassing things like sing Roxanne really loudly on the Karaoke machine. I am a champion eater, but I do think there is a limit to how much you should inhale although my Uncle Pablo disagreed.  He would often chase me around the living room with a fork piled with plantains, claiming I hadn’t eaten enough and I need to consume more if I wanted to have decent child bearing hips for all the little Pablitos I would pop out sooner or later (He thought he had the greatest name in the world and got sincerely offended when I didn’t name my dog Pablo).

I disagree with Uncle Pablo, although his attempts to assure the presence of his descendants were admirable. There is a limit to how much you can eat at Christmas. I learned that lesson in the most horrid way possible.

I was about 9. I was young and plump. I was Lael the Whale, as my classmate Walter Sherry put it during a kickball match. One Christmas, I begged my mom to help her cook Christmas dinner. Secretly, I just wanted to lick the bowl of cake batter but to do that, I had to be in the kitchen.  Bread roll duty was bestowed unto me and I accepted the task with unobtrusive apathy. After I managed to lick the cake-batter bowl clean I got distracted and decided to play with my pugs. Before I knew it, it was almost feasting time. I plopped the rolls on a pan, stuck them in the oven, and took them out an hour later.

Everything seemed just fine. Christmas joy was in the air. The pugs were snorting, the food was simmering, and everyone was laughing, like the opening of a family insurance commercial. My rolls were small, about the size of a golf balls so obviously I took five as I at least wanted a baseball’s worth. My uncle Steve was sitting to my left and similarly, he loaded up on a generous supply of bread rolls (around 7 or 8).

I had never been so full in my life. When my mother brought out the pies, I could barely look at them. I knew something was seriously wrong. Uncle Steve kept muttering under his breath: I am so full. It felt like my stomach was about to rip into a million pieces. Uncle Steve kept groaning. I had to go lie down on the couch.  My parents were shocked that I was actually full. My other relatives made fun of Steve for having a frail stomach. Uncle Steve followed me, and we lied on the couches in a Christmas dinner delirium. I felt seriously sick, but it’s not like I ate an entire ham? Uncle Steve was similarly perplexed.

My mother came into the living room and asked what the hell was wrong. I told her my stomach hurt and that I thought my body was going to explode. She asked me what I ate. “You had five bread rolls!” was her shocked reply to my answer. She went back to the table and asked how many bread rolls the others had. Everyone else seemed to only have one. She went to the kitchen and looked at the package for the rolls.

It turned out the rolls were supposed to rise for 6 hours in the oven before you served them. That means, they were supposed to be about the size of softball. In both my stomach and Uncle Steve’s, the rolls were rising to a point that left us exhausted, confused, delirious and so unbelievably full.

The moral of the story? Always read the packaging! But also remember not to let your stomach rule your head. In taking on more than you can chew, you may unwittingly spend the rest of the holiday on the couch, cursing the moment you scoffed that extra morsel of dinner.  

The secondhand on my grandfather’s watch, shimmering blue, makes it way past the VI, then the X, then the II and once again the VI. There is no poetry in its movement. Rather than gliding, it stutters, shaking a little in its march—and if one strains, one can hear that the watch’s ticks, are frantic, frenzied, almost desperate. The little needle struggles onwards, anxiously, past its two brothers, which are still to the eye. But look away and they are displaced, as if by phantom force. A minute ago it was 0:05, just now it has become 6:05. Twenty-four hours—wait, eighteen—remain before the window that at the moment reads 31 will, in a blink, read 1.

But it will do so unobserved. Instead its owner will stand transfixed, watching the television screen as the ball drops, ever so slowly, in Times Square. Exclamation and exultation will greet the moment of the ball’s final descent. Champagne, sparkling in glasses that reflect the warm light from up above and all around, will be quickly downed after a toast—a toast to a happy New Year. And so, in an instant that changes everything and nothing, will we begin anew.

It is an instant hallowed by secular tradition, bringing with it the glory of new beginnings and restarts. It is the time for resolutions, which lay the foundation for that great resplendent promise: the promise of a new self. Like snakes, we hope to shed the skins we sported in the past year and step forth wearing a newly woven set of garments, our old flaws mended and new virtues sown in. We hope to be recreated, in our own image, but without the crippling imperfections. We hope and our hope is a prayer to some internal divine. Because if we were created in the image of God, then surely we too can make fiction into fact. We hope, because more than anything else, the New Year is a celebration of the symphonic power of raw hope.

Let us rejoice in our prayers for one long heartbeat, rise up in the aching bliss of imagining the unreal. In a cascading crescendo, we see new loves and new successes. We see a transfiguration of the mediocre into the marvelous, of insecurities into strengths, of resentment into peaceful acceptance. We see in exquisite, glistening detail, the realization of hitherto failed conquests and the miraculous disappearance of previously insurmountable obstacles.

We allow ourselves to be thrown by ourselves, abandoned by ourselves, into reveries that would have been walled off and guarded by Cerberus himself at any other hour of the year. At midnight, as the hands on my grandfather’s watch align and the computer’s clock shines 0:00:00, we let reality become dream and dream become reality. Our hearts dance with frozen anticipation and a cry of joy rises to our throats, content just to have been summoned. The instant is eternal, containing infinities, and ephemeral, over as it begins. It is grace and salvation, blinding moonlight, gone before our conscious can note its arrival.

Time passes. Shadowy disappointment worms its way through the pale ruins and rotting fissures where hope has burned its path. The futures we lived and loved have returned home to the underworld from where they came, but now the shiver of an agonizing nostalgia spiders its way down our spines. The resonance of a memory punishes us with its sudden unobtainability. Cerberus has resumed his post, and Hades grins, or maybe sneers, or maybe cries. We were allowed to see our desires, but only as Orpheus was permitted to take Eurydice back to the surface—with the unwritten proviso that we cannot have them, just as he cannot have her.

In a second eternity, what was frozen becomes flame, and the cry of joy, an abject whimper of pain. Here is the moment of sin and despair. It is revealed that the ache of what is not is incomparably worse than the ache of what is. And that only absence, aeterno modo, can teach love and hate and need.

Prometheus is chained to his mountain, Atlas carries the sky, and Sisyphus rolls his boulder up his hill. Who suffers more: the Titans or the man?

But then, forever ends, and one last beacon of hope alights on a wintry peak far, nearly too far, in the distance. It is the lofty height upon which we, in our brazen humanity, had obliviously stood. We accept the challenge. Like Zeno, we resolve to begin the hike and with this decision, are returned to our company, to laugh and sing and embrace each other until finally we are called by the Sirens to sleep and to dreams, wish as we might for none.

***

I wake on January first to the ticking of my grandfather’s watch. With delight and horror I remember those two feelings of the night before, but not as vividly, illuminated as they are by only the faint colorlessness of the sun’s desert rays. The chaotic, beautiful music of the night has yielded to no music at all. In that deep silence, the godly and daemonic shrink away from my grasp. I find myself, somehow, in the month of Janus. Sprawling, dizzyingly, in every direction, are the future and the past. They are symmetrical—as they must be—and unfold concurrently, created by I, who am in the now. At every fork, I see what was and what will be, what I wish were and what I wish would be.

Some of the roads, the ones of the past, fall away. From the rest grows a labyrinth. Behind me lies a mirror, ahead is my promised peak. An irremediable step takes me into the pitch-black darkness.

If you’ve ever watched Bridget Jones, you shall know that turkey left-overs are a constant of Christmas. In this recipe, turkey and other bits and bobs make up a lovely pie to feast on over the next few days before you get truly turrkey-ed out!

Ingredients:

225g plain flour

55g butter

45g lard

Milk or water

Turkey leftovers

Stuffing leftovers

Any other bits and pieces – veg, old pigs-in-blankets etc.

Salt and pepper

1 onion, diced

1 clove garlic, diced

1 egg, whisked (optional)

You will need a large pie dish and either rice or baking beans to blind bake the pastry with greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Grease your pie dish with butter (or lard). Make the pastry. Pastry is easy to make, but most people have switched from lard to all-butter or other “healthier” variations. Without wishing to further the unethical meat industry, Cherwell strongly recommends that you use lard which will give your pastry a much better texture. Mix the butter with the flour and stir until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add a couple of teaspoons of water (or you can use milk) and some salt and mix with your hands until it becomes the texture of raw pastry. Chill the pastry for one hour in the fridge. Remove one third of the pastry and roll the larger section until it is as thin as you desire before placing it in the greased dish and pricking it with a fork. Put greaseproof paper and baking beans over the pastry and blind bake for about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave.

Fry up the onion and garlic, adding black pepper and salt. Place the some old turkey slices on your pastry and cover in ovnions and garlic. Place stuffing and old bits of other leftovers on top. Cover this with any remaining turkey. 

Roll out the final third of pastry and cover the pie. Make a small air hole in the pastry roof and decorate the pie as you like. I normally press a fork around the edge. Brush egg or milk on the top of the pie. Cook for about 30 minutes or until hot in the middle. The pastry should also go golden brown on top. Enjoy this Christmas treat – perfect with some cranberry sauce or even some leftover gravy!