December news from the farm
I expect you’re all exhausted by the Black Friday frantic and are not in the mood at all to be sold to. And so I won’t sell.
Instead I’ll gently encourage you to wait a while before you decorate your houses for Christmas. You don’t want to spend Christmas day wishing you’d had a chance to whip round removing the webs the spiders have had time to festoon your tree and baubles with in the nearly a whole month till Christmas.
If I were you, I'd spend a few hours deciding what you'll dress your house with. Walk around the garden and identify the boughs you'll cut, with which to deck the halls. Decide on an afternoon, around the 20th December when this cutting might take place.
In the meantime, take your time catching up with my Christmas wreathing and table scaping demos, or just looking at my Christmas YouTube clips for inspiration. Feed your cake with brandy. Make your brandy butter, bread sauce and stuffing and freeze it. Spend December using up the stale contents of your freezer so that you have space for the brandy butter, bread sauce and turkey stuffing which you can pre-make and freeze in advance so that you’ll have plenty of time for house decorating nearer the time.
I’m a big fan of pre-cooking as much of Christmas as you can. Indeed, it seems I have finally become the kind of person who makes two Christmas puddings one year so that I don’t need to make another the next. I’ve just taken last year’s spare out of the cupboard and dowsed it in brandy to refresh it, at the same time as feeding this year’s cake with a little slosh. It’s better to have a freshly decorated house, and a freezer full of food ready for cooking, than decorate a month in advance, so that the dust has plenty of time to settle on your baubles, and then spend the last few days before Christmas making a frantic mess cooking. This is a top life hack from me. Cook first. Decorate second. Be ready for Christmas and in the mood for it in a calm way.
My other top tip is (and I may be too late here,) that you avoid black Friday style sales like the plague. Instead carve out a few hours and go with a friend to do some real Christmas shopping in real shops, like I did here. Take a list by all means, but make the list one of people you’d like to buy something for, rather than be too prescriptive about what you plan to buy. And you’ll be amazed what you find – perfect, unusual gifts you really enjoy buying from real people you talk to and who are so pleased you’ve taken the time. You can stop and have a coffee. Relax. There’s no rush.
So there’s your order of activities for December. Go shopping in a real place with real shops – small and independent if you can. Then cook as much of Christmas lunch as you can and freeze it. Then watch all my Christmas demos and some of my Christmas inspo on the YouTube too. Then deck the house with boughs of holly. Then go to midnight mass, and hope that because you left a little of that Christmas brandy in one of your grandma’s sherry glasses on the mantlepiece with a mince pie you made when you were very relaxed in early December and which you’ve now defrosted and warmed through for him, that when you go to bed Father Christmas will come too.
Enjoy!
Georgie xx
In case you’re interested I’ve finally started a Substack to be a sister to my YouTube. Do have a look if you prefer to read than to watch – or even if you’d like more information about the clips I make for the ‘tube. Find me on Substack here.
(Christmas recipes I mention here are mostly Darina Allen or Delia Smith.)
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