(Food writer) Kate Young - LITTLE LIBRARY CHRISTMAS

THE LITTLE LIBRARY CHRISTMAS

THE

LITTLE

LIBRARY

CHRISTMAS

KATE

YOUNG

AN ANIMA BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Kate Young, 2020
Photography Lean Timms, 2017, 2019, 2020

The moral right of Kate Young to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The list of individual titles and respective copyrights to be found on p184 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN
9781838937478

Design by Jessie Price
Photography by Lean Timms

Head of Zeus Ltd
58 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.headofzeus.com

For my family (all my families).

In memory of Christmases past, anticipation of this Christmas present, and for the promise of Christmases yet to come.

Presently she came to the market square where the Christmas market was going on. There were stalls of turkeys and geese, fruit stalls with oranges, apples, nuts, and tangerines that are like small oranges wrapped in silver paper. Some stalls had holly, mistletoe, and Christmas trees, some had flowers; there were stalls of china and glass and one with wooden spoons and bowls. A woman was selling balloons and an old man was cooking hot chestnuts.

The Story of Holly and Ivy , Rumer Godden

If you have read my previous books, then it will come as no great surprise to hear that I adore Christmas. There are pages and recipes and reminiscences dedicated to it in both The Little Library Cookbook and The Little Library Year , and you now sit with this third, entirely Christmas-focused one, in your hands. But, unless you have spent Christmas in my company, you may not be aware of the sheer degree to which I look forward to it every year. The anticipation and planning consumes a good eight weeks of my calendar from early November, when I make my holiday playlist, book my cinema tickets, pull my favourite Christmas books down from the shelf, and start to consider parties and menus. It ramps up once Advent arrives, when I start cooking in earnest, filling jars with jams and preserves to give as gifts, putting my tree up, inviting friends round to celebrate, and making my Christmas puddings. It continues into Christmas week, and through that in-between period in the run up to New Years Eve, then all the way into January, only ending when I arrange for my Christmas tree to be collected on Epiphany.

I approach the season with boundless enthusiasm and a desire for everything to be as Christmassy as possible. And so, over my three decades of celebrating it, I have eaten a lot of Christmas food, watched an obscene number of Christmas films, read all the Christmas books I can lay my hands on, and listened to approximately 63 versions of O Holy Night (from the Kings College Cambridge choir to *NSYNC). In short, when it comes to Christmas, I am all in.

Im not for a minute suggesting that you need to do the same perhaps you dont really engage with the holiday until the middle of December arrives, or maybe your celebrations are restricted to the day itself. But I am assuming, if you have this book in your kitchen, that youre a fan of Christmas too. That you get excited by the prospect of a goose (or a glossy ham, or a vegetarian wellington) on the table, by a batch of mince pies coming out of the oven, by a jug of eggnog that has just been mixed up. That you enjoy stringing twinkling lights around your windows, and decorating the tree, and that youre inclined to hover by the brass bands and a cappella singing groups that take up residence in railway stations during December.

Long before I moved to the UK, and began to shape my Christmases into what they now are, I had a sense of what the season here would be like. So much of my early obsession with England was borne of the contents of my bookshelves, and so Christmas in the cold felt oddly familiar. From my bedroom in Australia, I spent Christmas with Shirley Hughes Lucy and Tom, with Noel Streatfeilds various families, with C. S. Lewis Pevensie children and the Beavers, and with Tove Janssons Moomins. I followed them through snow, and into their cosy homes, filled with the familiar scents of cinnamon, nutmeg, and a bird roasting in the oven.

Thanks to well-trodden rituals, to the universality of so many traditions, Christmas is, narratively speaking, a useful time to set a story. Theres a shorthand to it a kind of magic that can only happen when characters are no longer consumed by the regular day to day. Its a way of bringing people together in a place where the inevitable romantic declarations, family drama, and revelations can take place around a crowded dinner table dressed with holly and lit by candles. Its easy to explain characters saying slightly more than they mean to when theyre drunk on eggnog, or feeling claustrophobic after days spent in close proximity. And so Christmas scenes often pop up in books that arent ostensibly about Christmas: Emma rejects Mr Elton (after he rejects the very idea of Miss Smith) after a Christmas party, Jane Eyre makes preparations for Christmas when she stays with her cousins, Bathsheba Everdene hosts a Christmas party in Far from the Madding Crowd , Nikolai and Sonya prepare a pantomime in War and Peace .

It is woven too into Bridget Joness Diary , The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 , The Diary of a Nobody and The Diary of a Provincial Lady it could hardly be absent from books which take us through a year in the life of their characters. We expect, as we approach December, that the thoughts of our narrator will turn to gift giving, to parties, to turkey, because it is unavoidable in our own lives. It is, in these stories, an inevitability; a diary would be strange and incomplete without it.

Many of the books in the pages to come were, unsurprisingly, written with children in mind. Like so many Christmas traditions hanging stockings, dressing the tree, making gingerbread houses there is an unmistakably childlike joy intrinsic in their celebration. Though I dont buy into the rhetoric that Christmas is for children (I like it far too much to leave it to them entirely), I understand why images from Christmases in childrens literature are so iconic: the Pevensie siblings meeting Santa Claus in Narnia, the Great Hall at Hogwarts decked for the occasion, the Grinch sneaking off with a sack of stolen presents, a meal of hot chocolate and Turkish delight aboard the Polar Express. There is something truly magical about Christmas that invites us to shelve our cynicism, to lean into the joy, to find reasons to celebrate.

And so here, in the pages that follow, is a collection of reasons to celebrate. There are edible gifts to make, musings on Christmas trees, recipes for parties, and thoughts about quiet nights in. There are menus and plans for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Years Day, suggestions for leftovers, a longing for snow, and memories of gingerbread houses. This Christmas, and in Christmases to come, I want this book to be a friend to you in your planning, and your cooking, offering suggestions, inspiration and advice. And so I very much hope that the reminiscences, recipes, and beloved books you find here bring a little seasonal joy into your home and, most specifically, into your kitchen.