What’s your family tradition?
Perhaps a recipe for Christmas pudding, handed down through generations and festively set on fire, a blue and white flickering light, at the end of the dinner? Or maybe a Scottish fry-up first thing in the morning, with tattie scones, black pudding and the good bacon you’ve been buying from the same butcher for years?
Perhaps you’re a matching Christmas jumper or pyjama family? Or, conversely, do you all dress in your Sunday best and wait until after the Christmas meal before you tear open presents with a glass of sherry?
We had traditions in our family, too. Always a bag of chocolate coins, a handful of nuts, a few satsumas fragrancing our Christmas stockings. Always the grown-ups getting too drunk and someone having a row; the pressure and expectation of the day spilling over in the most destructive ways.
It might not surprise you to hear that, aside from satsumas and chocolate coins, I’ve not wanted to bring many of the traditions from my upbringing over into adulthood. Indeed, when I estranged myself from my family in my mid-20s, I had to learn entirely new ways of being.
Of all the things that were painful and difficult without them, like birthdays, graduations, heartbreaks – the things you would naturally turn to your parents for – Christmas was by far the worst, because it’s a time when you’re meant to be with family.
It didn’t matter how many friends I surrounded myself with or whatever partner I was with at the time, everyone went back to their family. And me? I stayed wherever I was, alone, just riding out the days until December 27.
But, over the years, I did manage to find peace in that solitude and make my own personal traditions. I was often travelling during my 20s and 30s, and so I had many far-flung Christmases in places where a few other travellers were floating around and the locals were busy with their own families and local routines.
Christmas mashed potatoes in Vietnam or Buenos Aires
On Christmas Eve in Hanoi, at Hoàn Kiếm Lake (also rumoured to be home of a giant, ancient turtle), they hold a festival with funfair rides, candyfloss, sausages on sticks and all the trees strewn with fairy lights. Basically, take a bowl of Valentine’s Day, throw in a handful of Christmas and a gaggle of loved-up, canoodling teenagers, and you’ve got Christmas Eve in Hanoi.
The next day, I went to a rooftop cafe, looked out over the rickety skyline of corrugated iron and crumbling colonial buildings and ordered the most comforting thing I could find on the menu: mashed potato with fried eggs and chilli oil.
Another Christmas, in Buenos Aires after a night dancing – or, trying to dance – the tango, I cooked myself a huge steak
Another Christmas, in Buenos Aires after a night dancing – or, trying to dance – the tango, I cooked myself a huge steak with my, now traditional, mashed potatoes, and ate it listening to a true crime podcast and bursts of fireworks being let off from the park outside the National Congress of Argentina up the road.
Perhaps the only tradition I carried through from my Scottish childhood as I wandered the globe was tatties. On a freezing houseboat on the Thames or in a flat above a kebab shop in Dalston, East London, I always made myself a mountain of sausage and mashed potatoes, simply because the dish gave me the comforting, stodgy, savouriness of a full roast dinner without the effort and, let’s be honest, slightly forlorn reality of making all that food for one person.
New traditions and anti-traditions
In my second year with my now husband, we spent a month in a working-class seaside town near Lisbon. We started Christmas morning swimming and bodyboarding, and then went to the local pastelaria, sitting by the extravagant nativity scene and watching pensioners in heavy coats with pristine helmet hairdos as they shared pastel de nata and neighbourhood gossip. That night, with only a single hotplate at our disposal, I made beef bourguignon with mash.
Later, in Prague, where we spent three Christmases growing and raising our baby son, we eschewed the traditional carp dinner sold live from tubs on street corners and often kept in bathtubs until Christmas Eve feasting – think fishy fibreglass. Instead, we had Czech “wine sausage”: a long, thin sausage, coiled like a snail shell, with, yes, tatties. Always tatties.
If there can be such a thing as an anti-tradition, my husband and I drink very little, if at all, at Christmas. A single glass of vinho verde to remind us of the year we woke up and ran downstairs to swim in the cold waves of the Atlantic. Maybe I’ll have a glass of Malbec to transport me back to my tiny flat in Buenos Aires. But, our new tradition: never more than one drink.
Along with the tatties and a single glass of something good, I do have one more tradition I’m working on, and that is to make sure my little boy has good memories of our family Christmases. I’m hopeful he might even want to carry some of them on for his children, too, along with whichever new ones he decides on, wherever he is.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays
Conversation