This is the secret to my Christmas excess, by Gerry McBride.
Don’t be one of those people who wakes up a stone heavier in January and has the gall to ask themselves, “how did that happen?” before facing the festive season with a clear awareness of just what is about to happen to you.
Embrace it, and count yourself lucky that you live in a country where someone is willing to sell you ten mini chicken satay skewers for €2.00 at a time when you have €2.oo to give them.
Christmas has always been a time to eat, drink and be merry, but the ‘eat’ portion of that transaction has really upped its game lately. All it took was one supermarket to change their annual Christmas food brochure from an A4 fold-out to a 36-page prospectus packed with photoshopped hams, and then all of a sudden they were all at it.
Across the country, consumers found themselves poring over the latest sleek catalogue from their local German discount superstore with all the wide-eyed wonder they first felt when they sat gazing through the toy section of the Argos catalogue in the 1980s.
Plate of wee sausages! Wow!
The finger traces across from the most splendid plate of wee sausages you’ve ever seen in you life, searching for the corresponding number on the index clarifying the product and the price. 4, 5, 6 AH! Plate of wee sausages, €3.00. Wow.
The dopamine hit blasts the reader back to a youth where mealtimes were a chore and running around the place was your go-to setting, where catalogues contained wondrous toys, not three increasingly-smaller fragments of birdflesh Russian-dolled into one larger outer birdflesh casing for less than the price of AA batteries.
“Look at that Scalextric; it has a section that goes up the wall and back down!” I cried as a youth.
Today, that exclamation remains pretty much unchanged, except the Scalextric is now a lobster caught and frozen in Norway (making it a… good lobster? I can’t tell) and the up the wall and down again bit is now a €5.00 price tag (you can’t say better than that for Norweigen lobster, surely).
Parsnips wrapped in rashers to make them edible
The pages of a festive food catalogue highlight just how and why you’ll pack on the pounds this December; lick your thumb to turn the page, and you’ve ingested 100 calories.
At no point do you spot something that looks less than delicious, and if you do, it’s probably dipped, wrapped or coated in something nice to even things out. Parsnips? Bleh. Not to fear, these are parsnips wrapped in rashers and sprinkled with a generous helping of Aegean sea salt (…good salt? I’m taking their word for a lot of things here).
Everything presented to you on the page is shiny. Not the pages themselves; the food.
There are no instructions with the produce that help you to understand how you can achieve a turkey that you can see your face in (or why this is a good thing), but I defy anyone to finish glancing thought one of these food pornos and not think to themselves; holy crap I’d better make my ham look like it’s had two coats of Ronseal or I am nothing more than a failure.
A whole side of smoked salmon for the price of a sandwich?
It’s not hard to eat a ‘whole’ of anything at Christmas time; everything is cheap, to the point where opting for a smaller portion seems utterly ridiculous.
A whole side of smoked salmon for the price of a sandwich? Well, throw this sandwich away, and let me pick at pinky while I watch a movie I’ve seen a hundred times in my winters, but never in one of my summers.
A whole duck? A whole lobster? Christmas doesn’t do fractions. Even Brussels sprouts are while cabbages, only smaller, sort of.
But where are my manners? I’ve just raced straight to the main course, without offering you readers any snacks along the way.
Constant grazing
Christmas isn’t just about a lovely dinner with friends or family, it’s about constantly grazing on a needless conveyor belt of salty misery for a fortnight, whether you can differentiate between what is an enjoyable way to curb your hunger and what is a chemical reaction in your body after eating one crispy MSG-drenched shard that spurs you to eat more of the same.
Crisps have become especially adept at sneaking extra calories into you, in a ghoulish mirror-image of how your mam used to try sneak cabbage into you by mashing it into your spuds (like you weren’t going to notice that your potatoes were light green all of a sudden).
The dawn of the tortilla chip in Ireland brought with it the added creamy fatness of dipping sauces (I would argue that no Irish person ever ate anything except perfectly dry crisps until 2002).
It’s not enough to have a plate of nachos; they have to be covered in cheese, and dipped in an array of sauces until what you have in your mouth is the perfect blend of sweet, spicy, sour, crispy and soft, like you’ve just fallen head first into a spice rack.
Tortillas are so out of control, many houses now have a special plate on which to serve them, with separate compartments on it for sour cream and guacamole and crispy onions and jam and, I don’t know, olives? Mackerel?
“You know you’ll be eating it by yourself at half nine in the morning…”
‘Party food’ is another yuletide wonder, with supermarkets pulling little goodie boxes of pastry-wrapped meats out of nowhere the minute the 1 December rolls round. What will you go for?
The American party food box, with ten onion rings, ribs, and cocktails sausages? Or the Indian party food pack with bhajis and samosas and other bhajis? Or the Chinese party pack? Look, just get one of each, and while you’re at it, quit lying to yourself that this is ‘party food,’ you know you’ll be eating it by yourself at half nine in the morning.
Too savoury for you? Luckily your living room has suddenly become what appears to be Willy Wonka’s stockroom, with tubs of chocolate goodness just waiting to turn your belly into a tub of chocolate goodness.
The chocolate coma
We seem to have combatted the fact that the tins of chocolates sold today are half the size of the tins of chocolates we remember from years ago by buying them three at a time, giving us an opportunity to eat more than ever before while simultaneously complaining that we’re not eating as much as we used to.
It’s a bizarre, Escher-staircase of chocolate where the start is indistinguishable from the end, far too much for your brain to comprehend so you distract yourself from it by lying back and joylessly shucking After Eights into your yawning maw while watching a celebrity version of a show you usually hate.
I don’t mention alcohol, because why would I? It’s the one thing about Christmas that is completely alcohol free, and I will hear no evidence to the contrary. It’s practically a vitamin, for Kringles sake.
All told, you should roll up to Christmas dinner wearing an oversized comedy Christmas jumper which you’ll say is ‘for the laugh’ but in reality it’s the only item of clothing you own that still fits you. You’ll have spent the morning receiving jumpers and shirts and jeans as gifts, and made sure to ask if the giver has kept the receipt so that you can exchange them for the next size up.
“Oh thanks for the pullover,” you’ll say, as it slips from your hand thanks to grease residue leftover from a scotch egg.
“I might just need to get a bit bigger of a size, your mistake was buying it in November and getting me the size that would have fitted me then. You didn’t account for the last fortnight, ha ha! Here, do you have any Rennie?”
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