HT: Craigellachie
From the London Times online:
Save me from this monstrous regiment of Christmas women
It was the gingerbread house that did it this weekend at the school
Christmas fair. It came with every mod con including, probably, a
marzipan Aga and planning permission for a treacle-toffee loft
extension. When my daughter compared it with our festive offering —
biscuits with icing that looked less like seasonal motifs than the gory
aftermath of some nasty angel violence — she burst into tears. I felt
like doing the same.
Yes, Christmas is here, the time of year when middle-class mothers
form into marauding bands of DIY enthusiasts and run amok at school
fêtes, threatening terrified incompetents like me with their range of
icing nozzles and home-made cards.
So grim is their determination to secure the best berries for
decorative purposes — decking the halls with boughs of holly is like a
biblical commandment to them — that the local robins avoid seasonal
starvation only by migrating with the swallows. Nature doesn’t stand a
chance.
They are people so competent that had they been around when
Jesus was born they’d probably have whipped up a stable, manger and
even a Babygro or two before you could say “Hallelujah!”
Rationally, I know that there’s no such thing as a genetic
disposition to handicraft. If there were, I tell myself, we’d all be
born clutching a copy of the Lakeland craft catalogue complete with a
guide to turning the placenta into a striking but practical table
centrepiece. For the rest of the year, it’s not something that bothers
me, apart from the odd twinge at the Viking-themed cake sale when every
other parent arrives at school with national curriculum-approved
lemon-drizzle cakes — with horns.
After all, it’s not as if I haven’t had time to come to terms with
the fact that however much I hone my DIY skills, they’ll always remain
a blunt festive instrument. Take Christmas cookery. After years of
trying, I’ve accepted that, in the right hands, icing sugar is a
versatile ingredient capable of transforming mundane cakes into
confections of breathtaking complexity. In my hands, it becomes a
substance so volatile that it’s the catering equivalent of a plastic
explosive, capable of self-detonation at any second and forming choking
clouds of white, sticky dust that coat children, pets and the tops of
kitchen units well into the new year.
Add the cookies that started off as Christmas stars only to
flow over the edge of the baking tray like the “after” photograph in
one of those educational “Build a Volcano” sets. Then there are carrot
cakes featuring whole carrots, and the home-made Play-Doh decorations
that never set. It’s no surprise that where good mothers trawl through
cookery books to make seasonal gifts, I ignore them, or feign death,
knowing that all I’ll end up with is a recipe for disaster.
I have clung to the hope over the years that the sting of
seasonal public humiliation would become less painful. But it’s got
worse. I thought nothing could top the shame of the nativity play which
my son’s trousers slowly descended during Away in a Manger,
the result of my decision to use an old hosepipe for the tail of his
donkey costume. But this year I was uninvited from the tombola
prize-wrapping coffee morning because of my poor showing at an earlier
pass-the-parcel event.
So this Christmas, spare a thought for those less fortunate
than yourself as you finish chainsawing the final ox for your nativity
scene just in time to greet casual visitors with Handel’s Messiah, rescored for three triangles and solo recorder; carol Jingle Bells
as you skip through the wood to where your perfectly symmetrical pine
tree awaits, knowing that your superior co-ordination guarantees that
your axe will strike only wood and never a major artery, or lovingly
weave the final strand of ivy into the front-door eye candy that is
your home-made wreath.
There’s one bright spot, though. For a while I worried for my
children, fearing that my failure in a festive world would blight their
future. But I think they may have worked things out for themselves. At
bedtime recently, there was a flurry of activity as they hid a book
under the bedclothes. I could swear it was called Crochet Yourself a Better Mother in Time for Christmas.
And she just got there last summer!
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