Too Much

My sister and her boyfriend Greg did a sterling job for Christmas Dinner. Incidentally December 25th probably the only day of the year I have Dinner in the middle of the day. The other 364 days, I have Lunch.

For the record. I eat Lunch at lunchtime and Tea in the evening. Unless I am a) eating out or b) at someone else's house or c) rustling up something more extravagant than broccoli and pasta to eat at home with guests - when it becomes Dinner. I don't dress for Dinner but I do expect some decent wine. Supper is what other people have before bed.

Anyway, I digress.

Sister and Greg were ace. Proper turkey, the world famous Sweet Potato stuffing (the recipe is the closest we have to a family heirloom, passed down from Tesco's Christmas Magazine circa 1997 via my mother to her eldest daughter) and more types of veg that I care to recall. We all ate far too much and groaned our way back to the sofa in time honoured fashion. Quite why we force such an ernomous plateful of food on ourselves in one go is quite beyond me. But we do, all of us. A massive proportion of the 60m people in the country all overeating at exactly the same time. A quite bizarre tradition of national gluttony.

And we feel all the worse for it, compounding the problems by cramming Christmas Pud into our greedy selves as soon as we sense there is room. I didn't make it as far as cheese and Port this year. A casualty of excess and a virulent bout of manflu.

Not that I really want to change it, though. We have so few food traditions any more apart from the roast bird and pigs in blankets that it really needs encouraging not denigrating. And at the same time we need to protect and promote the other few food traditions we have: Pancake Day, Simnel Cake, Grouse in August, Oysters in September.

Missing out on the cheese and Port (even a Fonseca single Quinta 1988, dammit) is a small price to pay to keep it all going.