Perhaps because they had been working so hard, Christmas day seemed the loveliest they had known. Nothing was very different from other Christmases; but somehow it seemed a particularly gay day. Their stockings bulged when they woke, and besides all the usual things in them, there were large white sugar pigs with pink noses and wool tails.
Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild
I had been in London for nearly two years when I moved to Hackney. A friend and I rented a tiny flat, with walls painted a dull shade of magnolia, and with a miniature, windowless bathroom. We moved in November, just as the trees had dropped the last of their leaves, and walked in circles around London Fields, kicking our way through the piles that lay beneath the trees. I had just started my first proper paid job in theatre, and London was starting to feel like a proper home.
As I began to make plans for Christmas, I felt the financial impact of paying a sizeable deposit, and of moving into an unfurnished flat. And so, while walking along Ridley Road Market on the way to work, I decided that all my gifts that year would need to be edible ones. I was cash-poor, but time-rich, and I had a glorious new kitchen to work in. The next few weeks were a flurry of cordials, marmalades, chutneys, pickles, and jams. I bought fruit and vegetables priced at £1 a bowl, turned them into preserves, spooned my wares into jars I’d collected (thanks to my mum’s example, I’d long kept a box of rinsed-out jars in the hall cupboard), and tied ribbons around them. A week before Christmas, as I boxed them all up so I could take them to the Cotswolds, snow began to fall thickly outside.
Even when my December has been filled with work and events, I’ve continued my annual gift-making tradition. I still keep a box of jars, ready for December, in the hall cupboard. I’m constantly thinking of new recipes that might work nicely in jars, boxes, or bottles under the tree. I find inspiration in the ingredients that are piled up in the markets, and in those dream Christmases I read about in books as a child, when I longed for snow, and stockings that hung over a fireplace, filled with edible treats.