Chapter 5
Holiday hell

Email To: Esther Marie
From: Leslie Ann
Date: 19 December
Subject: English Christmas Happy Cake recipe

Dear Esther Marie,

Do you ever wonder why an American loves to recreate the traditional English Christmas? Try this recipe and find out. It is partly responsible for why we are having so much fun here. Of course the cosy pubs and new friends all help, that is when I’m not baking a cake!

Ingredients
1 cup of water
1 cup of brown sugar
4 large eggs lemon juice
1 teaspoon of baking soda
nuts
1 cup of sugar
1 bottle of vodka
1 teaspoon of salt
2 cups of dried fruit

Sample the vodka to check quality. Get a large mixing bowl. Sample vodka again to ensure it’s acceptable. Repeat if necessary.

Turn on the electric mixer. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add one teaspoon of sugar. At this point it’s best to make sure the vodka is shill okay. Try a nip, just in case. Trun off the mixerer.

Break 2 leggs and add to the bowl then chuck in the cup and dried fruit. Mix on the turner. If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaterers pry it loose with a drewscriver. Sample the vodka to check for tonsisticity. Next, sift two cups of salt. Or something. Who giveshz a s**t.

Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add one table. Greash the oven. Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over. Don’t forget to beat off the turner, put the mixer in the dryer, finish the vodka and have a Merry Chrishhhmuss.

Love,
Leslie Ann

I think it is hard to be genuinely unique in a world where there is so much talent, an abundance of courage and a wealth of intellect; however, on this particular occasion I believe Bill and I more than qualified in one category. In all the British Isles no other couple could possibly have had 38,000 lbs of inventory, or, in more digestible figures, 706 presents to open for Christmas.

With three days left until the commemoration of the birth of Christ, our shipment was delivered burying us in boxes, bubble-wrapped furniture, cartons, garage junk and oceans of packing paper. Floor and air space simply disappeared as crates, one upon the other, rose upward to the ceiling like colliding tectonic plates, each pushing on the other for balance and dominance.

Apart from the privy, the only sacrosanct place in the house not overrun with boxes was the space in front of the television; we deemed that area necessary for our sanity. For days we were inert and overwhelmed with the sheer volume of what lay ahead of us. Unpacking was impossible, as there was no room left to decant the items. Further, the amount of wrapping paper produced from a single goblet expanded into our space like hair mousse shot from an aerosol can.

In hindsight, I have no idea how we managed to pull ourselves out of our warm bed each morning to face the bedlam. With courage and determination, we began unpacking. Soon the task became more like unravelling a ball of string; one box of memories led to the next. Cartons, previously tagged ‘master bedroom’ or ‘hall closet,’ meant nothing to us after so many years in storage, yet when one article was released from hibernation the paper trail in our minds was immediately activated. I could remember every shelf in my former closet, every pair of shoes, our collection of international flags and crazy party rhino noses and our first USA vanity licence plates. The only tearjerker in the shipment was Sam, our beloved metre-long, 60-centimetre tall, stuffed Alaskan lynx. His story is intertwined with trappers and their families, the demise of their outback village, the fickle fashion fur trade, boycotting bloodstained super models, an adventure cruise and memories of my mother on the last trip we were able to take together before her death. He brought tears to our eyes and warmth to our waiting arms. He was our only pet. We were finally reunited as a family.

We counted our blessings at Christmas, not to mention the number of unopened boxes. What few personal gifts Bill and I had purchased for each other were placed on an old, French-style wrought iron tree designed after those used in Burgundy. Three circular ascending tiers representing branches formed small shelves for our packages. It was a sweet reminder of so many holidays spent in foreign lands, not unlike the experience we were now enjoying in our own home.

This was in direct contrast to the emotions, or shall I say panic, we experienced in the inky hours of Christmas Eve when we were awakened by what sounded like hundreds of crazed devils unwrapping the packages around our tree. Sitting straight up in bed, we were paralysed by the thought of confronting the creatures or, worse yet, being confronted by them in our bedroom. Bill grabbed a putter out of his golf bag, conveniently wedged between two boxes in the hall, while I played back-up position with my mobile phone at the ready. It was at this point reality and our worst nightmares became juxtaposed.

Bill began searching through the forest of boxes half expecting to find a six-foot tall male wielding a machete. Then, all of a sudden, we heard manic blackboard-like scratching sounds coming from the wall cavity behind the wood panelling in our dining room. The noise was on the move. We followed the racket as it travelled up and over the door frame into the drawing room, down to the floorboards, up again into another door panel, across the mouldings, down the side until it finally came to rest in the study wall. Almost instantly, there was an eerie silence. With a flashlight in his hand, Bill moved closer to the creature hidden behind plaster and paint until we noticed an unfinished power point located close to the floor. Poking out of the space was a grey, hairy hand with five long fingernails. To us it looked more like a velociraptor than a lowly local rodent. Either way, it was not what we wanted to see in the dead of night.

Only slightly relieved, we returned to the warmth of our bed to devise a humane yet cunning plan to trap the squirrel the next day. Sadly, before we could come up with a solution we fell fast asleep. The following morning we awoke to an almighty crashing sound coming from the study. We can only assume our furry friend had made a leap of faith and escaped up the inside passage of the wall to freedom, as it was ‘all quiet on the Western Front’.

With the histrionics of the squirrel behind us, we decided to take a drive to put some damp, winter air into our lungs. We had had enough of the craziness of Stocken Hall for one holiday. Not surprisingly, every village was locked up tighter than a tick as it was Boxing Day. The streets were deserted. Pubs and churches were all closed. The only indication people were about came from homes with chimneys pumping out wispy, white smoke. We found ourselves alone, but not lonely. It was quiet, but not totally.

Boxing Day has a genuine reason to exist as a holiday in British culture. Traditionally, the landed gentry would have taken this day to bestow small gifts or ‘boxes’, often filled with the scraps from their Christmas Day lunch, to their farm workers and tenants as a token of gratitude for their service. One could argue the case that this was the forerunner of today’s corporate bonus scheme. It is probable this ritual still exits in the rarefied world of the aristocracy, but for peasants like us it was a day to give our stomach muscles time to recover and to watch old black-and-white films on the telly in the evening. This unquenchable British desire to see sappy vintage movies hijacks TV viewing schedules every holiday season.

Revived by the brisk air, we headed home at dusk without a sighting of man or beast. With the best of the day behind us, we noticed a glint of gold sparkling in a field slowly being blanketed by a low-hanging mist. Bill pulled the car off the road in order to get a better look. Standing alone, not more that 100 metres from us, was a man playing a shiny brass tuba. He had no audience and no visible means of transport. He was perfectly content to continue playing as we looked on in disbelief. Of all the things we expected to see in the open countryside this was not one of them. However, had the previous five days not been so disorientating we might have been compelled to alert the police to this man who was willing to play his instrument in public. Instead, we simply drove on. Somehow, it was all beginning to look normal to us.