Should we try and reimagine the Christmas feast?

It is that time of year when food columnists think, let’s update tradition. Seduced by the fake-frosted vitrines of fancy delis and traiteurs, everything shiny and red and abundant, glistering, gilded, twinkling with fairy lights. We are blessed with multicultural profusion. Oh look! French marrons glacés and truffle layered brie and Napoleon mandarin liqueur. Italian panettone piled up in their festive dome-shaped boxes, tricolore Christmas tree-shaped pasta, American sugar rush madness: green striped candy canes, red and green marshmallows, maple pecan bacon.

It’s not hard to concoct confections. Off the top of my head, what about: pomegranate molasses in the turkey stuffing, pancetta wrapped dates, curried sausage rolls, parsnip and carrot slaw with poppy seeds instead of roast root vegetables, cranberry relish with lime zest...

Some new ideas are a wild success. Like the time I made roast goose and shredded all the meat, tossed it with cumin and sumac and scattered it with parsley and coriander and pomegranate seeds that gleamed like rubies. It was festive and fresh. One year I made a proper Christmas cake with dried apricots and dried figs and smashed up whole walnuts that had been preserved in syrup so that even the shells were soft and edible. I fed it with whiskey for a month, covered it in homemade apricot jam, walnut marzipan and royal icing and decorated it with snowflake cut-outs and gold leaf. It didn’t last much beyond Boxing Day.

Once I baked a quadruple ginger cake (powdered, preserved in syrup, crystallised and fresh) and wowed everyone by getting them to make their own miraculous five-minute ice-cream to go on top. It’s a trick I learned from Harvard’s Science and Cooking class a couple of years ago. Salt lowers the freezing temperature of ice (which is why it is spread on snow-bound roads to clear them). So if you put a Ziploc bag of ice-cream mix into a larger bag of salt and crushed ice and—with gloved hands—massage the two together, the ice-cream will freeze-churn in a matter of minutes. My favourite Christmas moment was watching my parents helping their grandchildren smoosh a bit of ice-cream magic—everyone equally disbelieving until one after another, they exclaimed, “wow, it’s working!” “Wow, we made ice cream!” “Wow, it’s delicious!

If you like cooking, Christmas is a smorgasboard for the imagination. It’s Steavenson family tradition to decorate cookies with every imaginable coloured icing, all ages together—pink swirls for my two little nieces, black blobs clustered with silver balls favoured by their older brother, my Dad’s mushy tie-dye stars, my mother’s careful renditions of snowmen with coal buttons and carrot noses. But it’s also the mess and stress. An hour to scrape solidified sugar smudges off every surface in the kitchen; whole afternoons spent scrubbing blackened caramel bits off baking trays.

The other thing to do around this time of year is tell their readers how to plan and stage. Stuff so much in the freezer that there is hardly any room left for the novelty Christmas tree-shaped ice cube trays that you are going to fill with satsuma juice. Remember to buy duck fat for the roast potatoes. Make sure there is extra milk and butter in the fridge. For sure you will run out of bread at some point.

Yes, I’ve done these things. But preparation only encourages greater ambitions and follies. Christmas dinner is having to produce six or seven different hot things all at the same time in vast quantities out of one oven and a microwave that has only two results, no matter how much you fiddle with the settings: tepid or nuclear. It is many people’s most frightening kitchen experience.

Better maybe to consider the ready mades. Festive, indulgent; lazily sourced from the artisanal internet. Take off the wrapping and put it on a platter. A side of Hebrides smoked salmon. A whole York ham, bone in, richly encased with a layer of white fat. Game pie, a cylinder of stilton and a bottle of tawny port.

For a long time now my mother and I have tempered the Christmas crazy in our own family tradition so that the splash and effort is made on Christmas Eve so that on Christmas Day itself we won’t cook anything at all. We wake up late. Dad makes scrambled eggs for breakfast. We open a bottle of champagne. We open all our presents by the tree. We open another bottle of champagne. We put on our new cashmere socks. It’s late lunch time, we are beginning to get hungry. My brother makes some brioche toast and we sit watching the Queen, eating vast quantities of very good paté. Then we all fall asleep. Last year we had toasted cheese sandwiches for supper with a very nice bottle of Burgundy and watched James Bond. And we giggled and looked at each other and thought about everyone else arguing over the washing up and the giant hacked up Turkey carcass and said, “Yup, this is just about perfect.”