Do us a favour - let us live without Christmas timetables

Schedules were very satisfying to read as a child, in a dream of adult competence, and that is why we still read them, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE 

YOU MAY not know it but yesterday was Stir-Up Sunday. I know, it passed me right by as well. Apparently it was the day on which, traditionally, Christmas puddings were made in Britain by ye olde housewives. It is hard to tell who comes up with this stuff, but that piece of useless information emerged yesterday when the Observer printed a double-page Christmas schedule in its food section entitled “Only five weeks to go? No need to panic.”

Listen, bud, there are those of us who are actually managing to keep our adrenalin in check. Broadly speaking we are divided into two camps. The first consists of old Christmas lags who have been at the sharp end of the festive season for decades.

These ladies start planning the Christmas menus in August, shortly after they’ve finished the Christmas shopping.

These are the professional Christmas people – we are sticking with that old definition of professional as being a person who does it whether they like it or not – and they have their Christmas puddings done and dusted by Halloween. They don’t need any advice, thanks very much. They just need a pair of comfortable shoes and a large bottle of sherry, both of which they have already bought and lugged home from the shops themselves.

The first camp consists of people who are always aware of Christmas – as the fisherman is always aware of the sea, as the farmer is always aware of the weather – and perforce includes all children.

The second camp consists of people to whom Christmas comes as a terrible shock. Christmas is not counted as movable feast, but in this camp we think it damn well should be, because it is moving all the time and then jumps out at you when you least expect it.

It started out as just a normal weekend – walk dog, watch sport, listen to some teenage laments about the fact that there are only nine showings per day of New Moon, the latest in the Twilight series of vampire movies.

Arrive at the Dundrum shopping centre so early that you could actually get parking in the open air. Indeed the air was a little too open on Saturday, and we have blood relatives with no running water as a result of the storm. But their suffering was as nothing as we battled our way through the storm to the mall.

And then of course it hit – the Christmas tsunami.

Dive into denial, pretend it’s not happening, run home and place pillow over head. Next day stumble across the “Only five weeks to go? No need to panic” calendar. Here is what it prescribes for the December 11th: “Stale bread. Don’t chuck out stale bread: you’ll need it for stuffing and bread sauce.” You’ve got to be kidding.

By their reckoning you should have started your cheese board by the December 9th . That is, acquiring the cheese. Not sawing up a piece of wood and sanding it down for use at the dinner table. We must assume. Get your Camembert in early to avoid disappointment, seems to be the message on this one.

And don’t worry if you missed Stir-Up Sunday. Next weekend – that it November 28th and 29th – has been designated Baking Weekend, during which you can make your Christmas cake and your mince pies.

We’ve seen these schedules before. There are schedules for a lot of meals; and no schedule tougher, in my opinion, that the schedule for your traditional, non-Christmas roast dinner, with all the dishes staggering to the finishing line at radically different rates.

There used also to be the minute-by-minute countdown for throwing a dinner party, which read something like the SAS handbook, and was much more demanding.

These schedules were very satisfying to read as a child, in a dream of adult competence, and I believe that is why adults read them to this day.

I mean, if you are the type of person who is going to “buy and freeze bags of ice cubes before everyone runs out”, as advised by the “Only five weeks to go? No need to panic” calendar for December 15th, then you hardly need a calendar to remind you.

Some of the people I love best in the world are highly organised. Unfortunately for them high levels of efficiency in the domestic sphere are not rewarded with commensurate gratitude or admiration – although they should be.

I’m not saying that being chaotic is better. It’s certainly stressful, but arguably for a shorter period of time.

Our main catering question is: how much pizza can you make children eat? And the answer is, fortunately, one hell of a lot.

Our Christmas motto is : cocktail sausages are a wonderful thing (although it’s the adults who are wolfing them down).

The chances of us spending Christmas Eve scraping a nutmeg over egg nog are very slim indeed – even though we like egg nog, if we remember rightly.

We may be useless, disorganised and actually not even ready to be instructed. But do us a favour and let us live without the Christmas schedules.

There was a reason God invented the Advent calendar.

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