Coming home for Christmas

The sky is the colour of wet tarmac as the train sighs and pulls out of Waterloo. The towers of Battersea power station pierce the low fog that rolls as silently as a shadow across the city. A jigsaw of terraced houses and a web of streets flash past the window, then the train shrugs off the final suburbs and bursts into countryside. A forever of fields and sky.

I am sitting on the 11:20 train from London in a Christmas jumper with reindeers leaping across my chest and snowflakes falling from my shoulders. It is the 20^th of December, five days until Christmas.

My suitcases are heavy with presents and jumpers. A roll of gold wrapping paper pokes out of the corner of one bag.

It has been a long term. When I started the first week of my final year at university I was still shaky with the memories of glandular fever. I realised it had been nearly six months since I was last in class and working at my full capacity.

September was only four months ago but so much has happened. Perhaps most notably I have gone from being an unpaid intern to becoming a campaigner for fairer internships. In January I will start a new job at Intern Aware, the campaign I have been involved with for the past few months. My work so far has taken me to the Houses of Parliament and seen my name in the Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Independent and the Observer. I have met some incredibly interesting people and feel fulfilled doing something I believe in. The more people I talk to and the more campaign work I do the stronger I feel about this issue: it is not fair that young people are excluded from jobs just because they cannot afford to work for free. I am looking forward to an exciting 2013: joining Intern Aware in January and graduating in the summer.

But for now I am heading to the Dorset countryside and to the small town where my family will be waiting for me behind a wreath bedecked front door. As I sit on the train I can nearly smell the pine of the Christmas tree and feel the warmth of the Aga. I think of my mum, my sister and my step-dad and my heart glows like a street full of Christmas lights.

I may be looking forward to 2013 and getting my teeth stuck into a new job and my final university project, but now it is time to pause. Christmas is family time.

I am coming home.

Libby

May you have a Merry Christmas

 

This festive post is a little late, although not as late as you might think. 

It was as I watched my step-dad carrying a Christmas tree through the front door on the 3rd of May that I decided once and for all that my family (myself included) are mad. 

The neighbours looked on pityingly as my mum hung a Christmas wreath to our front door.

"How sad," I imagined them saying behind their net curtains, "that nice lady at number 9 must have lost her marbles."

My 22 year old sister and I hung our Disney stockings on the end of the stairs. We decorated the mantlepiece (and any other surfaces we could find) with lavishings of gold twigs and dark green foliage. As we hung chocolates onto the tree (a few getting mislaid in the process) we caught snatches of mum humming Christmas carols as she busied herself in the kitchen in her snowman apron.

On Saturday evening, with sausage rolls hot from the oven and champagne cocktails lined up on the kitchen table, we had friends round for Christmas Eve drinks.

"Merry Christmas!" they said as we opened the door, greeting them with the smell of mince pies and brandy butter and the sight of a Christmas tree covered in lights and crowned with a red felt reindeer. 

The next morning my sister and I opened our stockings with the squeals of delight usually reserved for seven year olds. A rubber duck tape measure!! A teeny tiny pink alarm clock! Quite frankly, you can never be too old for novelty shaped stockings and ingeniously creative miniature gifts.

This year my family celebrated Christmas on the 6th of May.

As a Christmas gift (yes, we exchanged presents, and ate turkey, and wore paper hats, and read out Christmas cracker jokes and winced at yet another "blind reindeer, no eye deer" corker) I decided to make something for everyone. After ending up looking like Dougal in Father Ted (see picture below) I abandoned my crafty ambitions and wrote them something instead. 

This is what I wrote for my mum, and it explains why we came to be sat around the dining room table carving a turkey in May.

Christmas is Cancelled

Last year, Christmas was cancelled. Two significant things happened. First, my sister moved to Australia. Second, in the middle of October I saw a fir tree being fed into a woodchipper on my street. It seemed a bad omen, and in that instant my festivities were aborted before they were even conceived.

It was our first Christmas that wasn’t the way it always was, and the way I suppose I assumed it would always be.

Until that year Christmas traditions in our family were kept like treasures or secrets. Christmas dinner meant turkey and a very specific accompaniment of trimmings: parsnips (for me), carrots (for colour), potatoes (both mashed and roasted in goose fat), leeks in cheese sauce (extra cheese), bread sauce (extra lumps), cranberry sauce and brussel sprouts, (one forced down by my sister and I, because ‘it’s festive’, the rest consumed happily by my mother). Stockings were hung on our doors long after my sister and I became too old for Father Christmas.

We kept these traditions because, like safely-guarded treasures, we feared that something of great value would disappear if they were lost.

Christmas was a tinsel-trimmed safety blanket that I would pull over my head mid November every year. As long as my sister, my mother and I hung our decorations on the tree together and listened to Michael Bublé crooning about log fires whilst my stepdad played vegetable tetris in the fridge, everything would always be ok.

With my sister halfway around the globe there didn’t seem much point. My mother gave Christmas its ultimatum in an email to my sister and I: “Christmas isn’t Christmas without the four of us, so has been postponed until further notice.”

When December arrived and the lights went up I was almost surprised. Didn’t anyone get the memo? Christmas is off this year. As I sidestepped my way between Christmas shoppers and battled a tied of yellow Selfridge bags on Oxford Street, I felt like a fish drowning in sky.

In the run up to Christmas more than ever before, I felt myself tottering along a tightrope between my childhood and the ephemeral realm of ‘adulthood’. On Christmas Eve, having decorated no tree and sung no carols, I found myself sat at a table amongst my dad’s family, being interviewed by a nine year old.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 19.”

“Does that make you a grown up?”

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

She looked me up and down.

“Well you’re older than me so I think so.”

If only things were so simple.

“She may be older than you,” said the nine year old’s uncle, “but she is still a lot, lot younger than all the other adults here.”

Later in the evening once the children had raced to bed (“the quicker I get to sleep, the quicker Father Christmas will come,”) I sat with the adults and helped them wrap the last presents and stuff satsumas into the heels of stockings.

Someone carried a shiny bike in from the garage. I immediately recalled the pink bike I received on my tenth Christmas, tied with a bow and attached with a tag that read ‘with love from Father Christmas’. I remembered the excitement with which my sister and I had tumbled down the stairs and into the sitting room and my squeals of wide-eyed wonder, “how did Father Christmas fit the bike down the chimney?”

I was sat with the grown ups and sipping the last of my champagne, but I felt like a child. And Father Christmas had just died. In reality, he died years ago, but this was the first time anyone had said it out-loud and the first time I could mourn.

Spending Christmas without Christmas and without my sister felt like trying to bake a cake without eggs and sugar. You can try as hard as you like and you might make something, but it certainly won’t be the Victoria Sponge you imagined.

Our Christmas may have been doomed from the start, but it made me realise that it is the people, not the traditions (however delicious), that matter.  

And, for a household of unashamedly hypocritical atheists, the month is of little importance either. My sister moves back to England next month. When she is home spring buds may be bursting outside, but my family will be sat around the table with Christmas hats on our heads and a turkey roasting in the oven.

In the end, Christmas was only postponed. 

Libby

It's beginning to taste a lot like Christmas...

My Gingerbread Recipe:

12oz / 350g plain flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 and a half teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

125g / 4 and a half oz butter (at room temperature)

175g / 6 0z dark soft brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons treacle

2 tablespoons runny honey

Icing and sweets to decorate

Gingerbread man cutter (or a knife and sense of imagination)

1) Put on some Christmas carols

2) Pour yourself a glass of wine

3) Don a pretty apron

4) Sift the dry ingredients (flour, bicarb, ginger, cinnamon, sugar) into a big bowl

5) Cut the butter into squares and add it to the flour and sugar mix, rubbing it in with your hands until the mix looks like breadcrumbs

6) Add the egg, syrup and honey to the mix and beat together with a wooden spoon

7) Tip the dough out onto a clean surface and knead it lightly. If it is still quite sticky, add flour to your hands and rub it in until the dough is smooth

8) Wrap the dough in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for 15 minutes

9) Pour yourself another glass of wine

10) Preheat the oven to 180c / 350F / Gas mark 4. If you are living in a student house where the oven doesn't close properly, fetch a chair from the sitting room to prop closed the oven door to stop the heat escaping

11) Take the dough out of the fridge, dust flour over a clean surface and roll out the dough until it is the thickness of a pound coin. If, like me, you are cooking in a student kitchen or are sadly not the domestic goddess you want to be therefore don't own a rolling pin, a milk bottle, glass tumbler or roll of tin foil (sellotaped to stop it unraveling) will do the trick

12) Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. Using a gingerbread man cutter or your imagination and a sharp knife, cut out your gingerbread men and transfer them to the greaseproof papered baking trays

13) Put your men (and women...?) in the oven for 10 - 15 minutes or until they are golden brown

14) When the timer pings / your phone bleeps / your wonderful sense of timing tells you the time is up, take the gingerbread men out of the oven and place them on a wire cooling tray, or a plate / any kind of tray if you don't have one

15) The gingerbread men will be fairly soft (I don't really like the really traditional gingerbread men that are as crunchy as a piece of bark) so be careful that they don't incur any injuries. If a gingerbread man does lose a leg / arm in the journey between oven and cooling tray, it is of course your duty to eat it

16) Whilst the gingerbread men are cooling, use the time to put on some new Christmas songs and dance around the kitchen

17) When the gingerbead are cool, it is time to dress them. I used writing icing, marshmallows and a batch of regular icing to give the gingerbread man below a very fashionable pom pom jumper. Equally, feel free to use a piping bag for more artistic designs or to decorate with smarties and dolly mixtures

18) Admire your handiwork

19) Gather your friends and let the annihilation of a whole gingerbread population commence.

My Christmas Chocolate Cake

I don't know many people who actually like Christmas cake, so I made my housemates a gooey and calorific chocolate cake instead. It is a little known medical fact that calories don't actually count at Christmas. Or if they do all that baking, peeling and chopping of veg and wrapping of presents burns them off, easily.

6oz / 170g self raising flour

6oz / 170g butter

3oz / 135g caster sugar

3oz / 135g soft brown sugar

3 eggs

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 bar of dark chocolate

4 teaspoons cocoa powder

1 bar white chocolate

1) See above and instructions 1 -3

2) Preheat the oven to 180c / 350F / Gas mark 4.

3) Sift the flour, sugar and baking powder into a large bowl

4) Add the butter and eggs and beat it all together with a wooden spoon. If you have a hand-held electric mixer you could technically use that but I like to think that the energy required to beat the mix by hand removes any guilt when it comes to eating the finished cake

5) Melt the bar of dark chocolate. If you have a microwave (I don't) break the bar into pieces and put in a microwavable bowl for 15 second bursts, stirring in between, until the chocolate is smooth and melted. To melt using a hob, you can boil some water in a pan and put the broken pieces of chocolate into a bowl resting in the water. I tend to just put the chocolate directly into the pan and stir it loads to make sure it doesn't burn or stick to the pan

6) Pour the melted chocolate into the cake mix and fold it all together with a wooden spoon

7) If there is some chocolate left in the bottom of the bowl / pan, get whatever fruit you have in the kitchen to wipe the bowl clean in an impromptu chocolate fondue

8) Sift in the cocoa powder

9) Keeping the bar of white chocolate in its wrapper, bash it into little pieces. This is the fun bit and here are some good bashing tips: whack the bar with a rolling pin / shoe / saucepan, hit it against the corner of a work surface, if you live on several stories, go to the top of the house, throw the bar out the window and go into the street / garden to retrieve it, throw it at someone you don't like (I do not endorse violence, especially not whilst cooking)

10) Mix the broken white chocolate pieces into the cake mix

11) Grease a round cake tin and pour the mixture into the tin

12) Put in the oven for 35 minutes or until a knife comes out clean or almost clean (this cake is supposed to be a bit gooey)

13) Put the cake on a cooling rack. Once the cake is cool, decorate as you like, then cut yourself a big slice and enjoy.

Libby

Twas the Night Before Brixtmas

The Night Before Brixtmas

Twas the night before Brixtmas, and all through the house

Each student was sleeping, as hushed as a mouse.

A six-person silence as they slept in their beds

Visions of yule logs and booze in their heads.

Bins were upturned by a fox in the street,

Scavenging out some Christmassy treat.

Buses and sirens whined on the Hill

But still they slept on, drunk on goodwill.

Lorries and trains speeding through town,

Planes going up and planes coming down:

Each noise is a story that London tells,

But out of that mix, came the sound of bells.

Bells in the darkness, almost silent at first,

Then bells in a ‘flying-through-sky’ kind of burst.

As housemates slept and dreamt that it snowed,

A reindeer-pulled sleigh parked on Helix Road.

Out of the sleigh climbed two sooty old boots

And a jolly old man of Jamaican roots.

“Ho ho!” he chuckled as he patted his deer

And crept up to their door, “Father Brixtmas is here!”

With the magic of Brixtmas at the touch of his hand,

He passed through the door like it was nothing but sand.

“They must be asleep,” he said to the night,

And then searched the house to check he was right.

On tiptoe he poked his head round each door,

He saw Max asleep and heard Libby snore,

He checked in on Emma, he snuck in Emily’s room,

And saw her tucked up in the warmth and the gloom.

He looked in on Josh, quiet and dreaming,

He saw Isaac asleep and then started beaming.

Father Brixtmas was happy, the scene had been set,

To give them a Brixtmas they’d never forget.

“I won’t give you toys,” he said to the sleepers,

“I won’t give you clothes, or black brothel creepers.

You don’t need my gadgets or gizmos or books,

You’ve already got friends and dashing good looks.”

“You all live in Brixton, the best place to live

There really aren’t many gifts I can give.”

He didn’t bring presents in his bell-adorned sleigh,

But something much better for their Brixtmas Day.

He snuck to their kitchen and cleaned all the dishes,

He unworried their worries and granted their wishes.

He filled every room up with festive cheer

And gave them enough smiles to last them all year.

When he was finished he sighed with a smile,

“My work here is done, now I’m off for a while.”

He shut their door with the sound of a feather

And stepped into the night and the wintery weather.

The street was still empty, save for the fox,

Eating mince pies in a thrown away box.

Nose covered in sugar, she looked to the sky

In wonder as she saw 12 deer flying by.

Father Brixtmas was steering as the deer pulled strong

With a clatter and jingle of bells he was gone

But she heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight

‘Happy Brixtmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

Libby

Happy Brixtmas Eve: Herne Hill

On Saturday evening I was back at Herne Hill to visit their Christmas market. Railton Road was taken over by festive stalls, carol singers and the odd farmyard animal.

As the sun began to set everyone crowded around to witness the ceremonial 'turning on of the lights'. Westfield may have got Justin Beiber, but at Herne Hill the excitement was just as great as locals, visitors, several sheep and a Shetland pony huddled in anticipation. No one seemed to mind the fact that these lights were strung around one lone tree. When they started twinkling the cheers made up for the lack of drama created by the lights themselves.

Before heading home I popped into Pullens to drink a mug of hot chocolate whilst sat in one of their battered old leather chairs looking out over the square. Christmas was in the air and in the warm mug between my hands.

Libby

Happy Brixtmas Eve: Brixton Village

This weekend it was Christmas in my house in Brixton. Or Brixtmas, as my housemates and I christened our festive celebrations before we all went back to our various homes for the holiday.

I had agreed to cook a Christmas dinner for my housemates on Sunday. On Saturday as well as buying a turkey and an ample supply of vegetables (eight varieties in total) I headed to Brixton Village for some Christmas shopping.

The undercover market is one of the many highlights of living in Brixton (for somewhere with such a bad reputation, there are a huge number of these). As Jay Rayner recently attested in a review for the Observer, it would be impossible to mention all of the gems situated in Brixton Village. As well as gift shops, African fabric emporiums and the general market stalls where you can buy anything from bathroom scales to religious figurines, Brixton Village is home to some of the best restaurants and cafés in London. And not just a few of them, but so many that eating out there is as much heavenly as it is a decision-making nightmare.

Many of the restaurants aren't licensed so work on a 'bring your own' basis and food is affordable (even for a student like me). To give you a sample of the breadth of food available at Brixton Village, under the one roof you will find both the best (arguably) burger and pizza restaurants in London, a vegan cupcake shop, a café with toasters at each table for you to toast your own bread, an amazing Thai restaurant and a café that serves street-food from Pakistan.

If it sounds too good to be true, there are a few drawbacks to Brixton Village. The variety does make choosing where to eat or have a coffee nearly impossible, so be prepared to wander around in an overwhelmed daze for half an hour or so before deciding. The opening times are somewhat limited (Monday - Wednesday: 10am to 6pm, Thursday - Saturday: 10am - 10pm, Sunday 12pm to 5pm) which makes the whole place pretty busy during its open hours. And many of the restaurants look onto fresh meat or fish stalls which doesn't help a hangover on a Saturday morning (I have heard).

Nonetheless, I love Brixton Village, and it is a testament to the diversity and general buzz of Brixton itself. And it was a perfect place to spend the afternoon on Brixtmas Eve.

Libby

Libby's Christmas Challenge

Libby