In my house at least, Christmas dinner always runs to a certain routine. Dad picks and preps the vegetables, mum cooks the same meal as she's always done and I sit on the floor with my brother, playing with our new toys and desperately attempting to fend off the suspicion that we probably should have stopped doing this about 20 years ago.
Scenes like this probably play out up and down the country. The traditions vary from household to household, which is why every now and then you'll find yourself having a stand-up row about whether bread sauce is a required element or not, but they stay the same year after year.
Try telling that to our celebrity chefs. This year, perhaps more than any other year in living memory, they're out in force on a mission to shake up how we eat at Christmas. Over the next couple of weeks, the television schedules will become hopelessly engorged with all manner of festive cookery shows. Last night it was Victorian Farm Christmas.
Tonight it's Jamie's Christmas With Bells On. On Friday it's Stuffed: The Great British Christmas Dinner. And then next week things really kick into gear, with Nigella Lawson, Countrywise Kitchen, Rick Stein, Nigel Slater, the Hairy Bikers, Kirstie Allsop, Lorraine Pascale, Raymond Blanc and Gordon Ramsay all trying to force you to do Christmas dinner their way.
Each of these chefs have their own little nuances – Rick will tell us how they eat Christmas dinner in Spain, Nigella will plunge her turkey into a dustbin before she cooks it, Gordon will cook his dinner live during a four-hour Christmas Day special and Nigel will probably just cobble something together from bits he's found at the back of his fridge – but the cumulative effect is dizzying. Enough is enough.
Perhaps we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking that anyone will actually attempt any recipes demonstrated on these shows. Perhaps, like me, people will only watch them to see which spurious rationale has led Lorraine Pascale to Paris yet again, or count the times that Rick Stein wishes Britain was more like Spain, or play Spot The Extra That Nigella Is Feeding Despite Never Having Actually Met Before. But even so, the timing is awful.
As anyone who has ever attempted a Man Vs Food marathon straight after a pizza will wearily inform you, there's nothing worse than looking at food when you're already full. And this is Christmas, for crying out loud. Everyone's full all the time. They will be until the first week of January. Viewed in this light, these seasonal cookery shows are nothing more than cruel excuses to beam images of gluttony into our swollen faces. All those close-ups of glistening meats and heaving cake platters are just there to prompt us into waves of guilt-ridden nausea that will only stop once we've checked the online diagnosis sites for symptoms of gout.
So perhaps the television editors should lay off the cookery shows next Christmas. Not every chef needs one. It's simply too much food.
If you replaced at least one or two of these programmes with a single shot of a rotating celery stick, I'm sure nobody would really mind.
