Where do you shop for your festive food?

We usually end up eating too much of the wrong things at Christmas and also having lots left over so we are going to try to do things differently this time. There’ll be just the two of us; we won’t have a turkey put to death just for us and we are going to try to buy only what we will need for a decent dinner and stop the gorging. Fillet steak and fresh vegetables is likely to be our choice for dinner, possibly a small cake for teatime. No Christmas pudding but perhaps a mince pie with luxury ice cream. Plenty of fruit will be available as normal. For Boxing Day it will probably be a bit of a treat like a full English breakfast at around three o’clock! The day after that we shall probably go to a pub and have some fish and chips for a change.

I expect we’ll get the food from Waitrose and M&S as the other supermarkets seem to be reducing their ranges of quality foodstuffs, especially fruits and cheeses. We are already overstocked with liquor in various forms so we don’t have to worry about that.

I have just noticed that last year’s Christmas table napkins have come out again and it looks as though there are still enough left to see us well into the New Year. We don’t have enough family left in any generation to have a house full again so why do we get so much stuff in?

Christmas is the only time I eat turkey but I will have to wait and see which member of the family invites me to Christmas lunch and be thankful that I no longer have to cook it, and very grateful for whatever is served on the day, as long as roast parsnips accompany it!

The Christmas after losing my eldest son (2004), I chose to spend it on my own with my thoughts and a Waitrose pre prepared roast chicken meal, followed by a mini Christmas pudding with fresh cream. Each Cbrismas since then I have tried to spare a thought for all the people who have lost loved ones during the previous year. I rarely touch alcoholic drinks so a single glass of a nice Italian red will be sufficient to compliment the meal. I used to take one of my speciality sherry trifles along with me which always proved very popular with everyone but these days a cheese board with a selection of different cheeses and maybe the odd pickled walnut, is the preferred choice.

I almost forgot, smoked salmon for breakfast is a must on Christmas Day.

In a rare departure I’ll respond to the question in the topic header. Living in a mountain (not a misprint) we have to allow for the weather conditions perhaps more than most. There isn’t a single major supermarket within a 15 mile radius, and getting up to where we live is something of an art, depending on the weather.

So we’ve developed a strategy that involves buying from four different supermarkets during the same week. In other words, we spread the risk. Our preferred SM, Waitrose, is thirty two miles away through the mountain passes, so in the mid-December period they’re the most likely to be stuck in avalanches, blizzards, floods, snow storms, volcanoes or earthquakes (other disasters are available).

The option would be taking our Toyota 4 x 4 and ploughing through the snow-covered tracks to reach the store, then to plough through the frenzied hordes, apparently fresh from roles as extras on Day of the Dead seven, attempt to find what we want from a store already bearing the marks of having been looted by a less civilised branch of ISIS, locate a cashier that hadn’t actually lost the will to live and garrotted themselves on a string of speciality garlic and strawberry spleen sausages, wait in the queue that resembles what Dante almost certainly had in mind in his masterpiece (often think he was influenced by a earlier version of M&S), watch as the seconds of life tick relentlessly away, get to within two victims of the cashier only to find the old lady at the end is attempting to pay the bill in groats and has put the wrong spectacles on, anyway, finally attain Nirvana and the cashier, to learn the ‘system’ has overloaded, the store having apparently not told it that Xmas has arrived, eventually pay then crawl, now utterly demoralised and exhausted, towards the entrance door, the automatic opening system of which has failed, so it now resists all attempts to open until you turn away, whereupon it cunningly springs to life and smacks you in the back of the head, forlornly drag our now battered and bruised bodies back to where we parked the car, only to find the people on either end of it have made the joint assumption that we only need three inches on either end to get out, finally escape the insanity which is Christmas Eve in any sort of settlement, drive the fifteen miles back to the mountain retreat, dodging the hapless and unwary who’ve taken to the roads in the motorised equivalents of prams and are wondering why they can’t get up ice-sheeted hills with their smart new low-profile summer tyres, eventually and thankfully make the homestead, open the door and notice that the power has gone off, that being the first thing the distributors do when they want to play their merry pranks around Xmas, drag in the shopping bags, make it upstairs to the lounge, collapse in the comfy armchair and reach out for a warm glass of mulled wine – which is when we realise what we’ve forgotten to get.

I hate shopping.