The goose had been in the oven for hours, but it didn’t seem to be browning. In fact, it was barely cooking. It was Christmas 2017. Just as the predicted snow hadn’t arrived, neither had the characteristic aromas in the kitchen. On the one day of the year it was fully booked, the oven had quietly packed up.
My mum and I looked around at the trays of potatoes, pigs in blankets, honeyed parsnips, carrots and brussels sprouts lined up for their turn in the now defunct oven. Thankfully, only the two of us were waiting for the oven’s offerings.
While the Christmases of my childhood had been family affairs, the gatherings became smaller as I grew up, and were often just me and my parents. We had long since dispensed with Christmas crackers, but food remained centre stage. Then three became two.
After my dad died in 2013, I would have cancelled Christmas if I could. The thought of festive exuberance felt impossibly painful with an empty chair at the dining table. So I did the next best thing and booked my mum and I flights, taking a trip to Cambodia that we had been planning as a family, in search of warmer weather and moods.
We couldn’t avoid Christmas entirely, finding brightly lit trees and vast inflatable Santas in hotels and shopping centres, but being away from personal seasonal rituals softened everything.
But now, it was another Christmas spent trying to get back into our family rhythms with someone absent from the room, and those familiar pressures crept back in. It now fell to me to carve the meat and to make the jibes about the gravy being too thin. But it also felt as if I needed to keep Christmas going. Perhaps I wanted to show that we could still do things the way we used to.
In fact, we were trying to keep each other afloat, without ever acknowledging that. While I would have happily opted out of much of what modern Christmas entails – it has never been my most wonderful time of the year – the rituals in the home felt important to my mum, so they were for me, too.
Back in the kitchen, however, the oven was not cooperating. Everything else could be heated on the hob, but the obscenely large goose was an uncooked symbol of excess. After briefly contemplating fried goose, we remembered the neighbours were on holiday. They had left a spare key and, crucially, an oven.
So we donned our coats and jumpers and the foiled bird flew the coop. We walked on to the village street with our baking tray, laughing. We left the goose to cook, and went home to rescue the rest of the meal from the frying pans on our hob.
Unsurprisingly, part-cooked goose doesn’t travel well, especially when teamed with an unknown oven and impatient chefs, but the enterprise had injected joy into the day. The oven’s element was not the only thing that had popped – so too had the pressure. We were having fun on a day we had been dreading.
I carved off the edible parts to serve with fried potatoes and gravy, laughing and wondering why we were trying to cook all this food for two anyway. It reminded me of childhood Christmases in Australia. Everyone in the UK assumed that meant throwing shrimps on the barbie, but we always had full turkey and trimmings in the height of the Sydney summer, with my dad insisting on lighting flaming brandy on Christmas pudding in 30C-plus weather.
Too few of us who are in the position to do so stop to ask what we really want from Christmas, caught up in tradition and obligation, consuming more than we need or spending more than we can afford. I thought I sought out low-key Christmases, but some parts became performative, even when it was just the two of us.
The year of the broken oven was the year I stopped doing what I thought I should be doing at Christmas. Now, if I am at home, it’s simple cooking, movies and bribing my cat into wearing a Christmas scarf. Without expectations, it’s a day of joy, rest and love, just as it always should have been.
Two days after Christmas, still frying leftovers next to the idle oven, a dusting of snow landed. Its timing, like the oven, was a little off, but it was close enough to a white Christmas.
