OK, I said, calmly.
I looked at the floor where a piece of salami from the colourful tapas plate, beautifully arranged for my son’s Christmas starter because he didn’t like the smoked salmon or pâté that was on offer, had fallen during the Christmas dinner.
It was now evening on Christmas Day.
I had asked my son to pick up the slice of meat and squashed stuffed olives - they were all underneath his chair - and he made the sort of exhausted half-hearted gesture of the full-bellied-about-to-burst-and therefore-unable-to-bend in its direction and went on talking to his father - while making an enormous ham sandwich with Fields bread and a bag of Tayto crisps and mayonnaise.
To me, it’s an offensive thing to slap my beautiful, twice-cooked ham (cooked once on top of the cooker in cider with a homemade mustard and ham glaze, and secondly at his request, in the oven in slices covered in our old home Ham a la Crème recipe, which means in a French blue cheese, white wine, double cream cheese sauce). Sliding the result of such gastronomic skill between two slices of a sliced pan is more than my pride can take.
Once the sandwich was gone, my son joined his father in enthusiastically upending the Christmas pudding from its heavy white bowl - made by my 83-year-old mother-in-law - and digging into it with gusto. Dark succulent crumbs spewed everywhere.
Visitors had come and gone and I had already cleared away several rounds of empty crumby plates and half cups of tea and empty glasses of wine and whiskey.
“I,” I said magisterially, “will not be picking up any more of that.”
That was grand they said, shambling back over to the fireside armchairs for a nap, oblivious to the Napoleonic-style devastation behind them, “nobody asked you to.”
“We’ll do it later.”
“Well, thanks,” I said sarcastically.
And stamped out for a walk.
Only the dog had the energy to come.
“Don’t you dare touch that bit of salami on the floor there,” I ordered her as we left.
She looked at my face mournfully as we emerged into a strange, cloudy night with a ring around the moon.
“Look up there,” I told the dog. “Storm coming.”
We walked on. I’d be glad to be shut of Christmas, I thought.
It’s not my favourite time of year anymore.
I used to love it. I used to spend absolutely weeks preparing for it - buying and decorating the tree, lugging down enormous green decorated wreaths, wrapping presents, hand-writing addressing and posting anything up to 50 cards, polishing the good cutlery, getting Granny’s bone-china dinner set lovingly washed and buffed, checking the good table cloths, dusting off the Nollaig CD and getting everything ready for the big day.
On Christmas Eve, we hauled in tubs of holly and ivy for the last-minute decorating.
We, believe it or not, had not one, not two, but three Christmas trees. There would be a lovely real tree, which I loved. Then a big artificial glittery affair which my husband liked. Finally, there would be a little artificial fir at the top of the stairs called the Children’s Tree where they would hang home-made decorations. Where I got the energy or the gusto for it all, I have no idea. And that was before all the food shopping and cooking extravaganzas.
This year, in the last calm weeks ahead of what was to be a much quieter, adult-only Christmas, my son asked me for the family recipe for a festive barbecue in Scotland where he now lives.
He thought he’d wow the Scots with our home-made Crunchie ice-cream accompanied by a home-made butterscotch sauce.
“All I can remember was that you folded egg-whites into it,” he recalled.
I snorted.
“I can’t remember anything except you bashing the crunchies with a rolling pin and eating fistfuls of the crumbs as soon as my back was turned, and then having to send you down on the bike to the shop for more Crunchies at the last minute,” I rejoined.
As we squabbled, a handwritten cardboard menu, carefully crayoned with a sprig of holly and the date in a childish hand, fell out of the book. It was dated December, 2002. Twenty-one years ago. He would have been only five years old.
“Phew,” he commented.
We looked at the menu.
Every starter, every one of the six or seven different vegetable dishes, every one of the three stuffings - bread, lemon sausage-meat, garlic and herb - and each of all five different sauces - Cumberland sauce, cranberry sauce, red wine gravy, bread sauce, the French blue cheese sauce for the ham and then each of the five desserts - apart from my mother-in-law’s pudding that is - had been homemade by me. Not to mention the mulled wine.
One year, we even made our own chocolate truffles for coffee and afters, like.
“Christ,” I said awed, was I completely mad?”
We stared speechlessly at the menu.
My son and I used to get up together at around 7.30am Christmas Eve. We had a list. We would work together, me stirring and mixing and cooking, him washing up and drying and generally tidying along behind me, ’til about 3pm, at which point I would give him special Christmas work pocket-money and a hug for his labours.
Our gargantuan work sessions generally ended with me laying the Christmas table, and him hoovering and washing out the kitchen floor.
Then we would collapse in the clean, empty, tranquil Christmas-scented house. The others were, somehow, always out.
Christmas Day the house was gorgeous, heaving with guests, invited and uninvited. The rooms were full of merriment and laughter ’til late in the evening, though I was usually in bed and asleep by 6pm, worn out.
The year the son turned 17, he got a job in a trendy pub for the Christmas holidays.
It had occurred to him that he had amassed some excellent Christmas Eve skills, and that he could actually be paid quite well for these skills while not actually having to work like a dog.
It took a couple of years before I realised he would never be coming back to the Christmas Eve kitchen.
For a while my husband tried to help, but he was untrained, clumsy and argumentative. Never having realised quite how much work was involved in Christmas Day, now that he had to do some of it he quite failed to see the point.
After that, I generally struggled along on my own, until the year that a tumble forced me into an ankle-to-thigh cast for several months, a period which covered Christmas.
In late November, we contacted the usual guests to explain that the cook was in pain, on medication, in a cast and out of action.
Everyone was most understanding, riposting cheerily that they’d manage themselves this year, ha ha ha.
That Christmas Day, after years of an oiled Christmas machine and gales of gaiety, we fell flat on our faces. Terrified by tales of salmonella, my husband grimly refused to take the turkey out of the oven until it was rock-like and coloured black; and that was only the turkey.
As Dan Rather says, a tough lesson in life is that not everybody wishes you well.
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