Recreating the Great British Christmas

Welcome, celebratory reader, and I hope your recovery from Christmas excesses is going well. Here we've been revelling in the mild weather that passes for a Californian Christmas, and thinking about how we can have the Christmas experience which is as close to what we're used to as possible. I think we did a good enough job, but some things just weren't reproducible here on the other side of the pond.

The most obvious thing we had to deal with was separation from our families, which we could only really mitigate through video calls. So it was that Christmas morning felt quite a lot like work: getting up earlier than projected in order to join scheduled video meetings with the Europeans! Of course, it was wonderful to see everyone, but not quite like the real thing. Maybe next year.

The primary focus of the day was of course Christmas dinner, and mostly the British version of this can be reproduced stateside. The humble yet celebrated roast potato is something that doesn't really seem to be done here, so although simple to recreate, this is an experience that we can't help thinking not many of our neighbours had. Well, it's their loss dear reader.

No, the things which are hard to reproduce are somewhat more obscure and unexpected. Who would have thought that the Americans really have no idea of the benefits of a packet of Paxo? Here's what passes for stuffing here:

As you can see, this is basically some cubes of bread, and the "easy prep guide" tells you to go out and buy onions and celery and fry them up yourself to combine with this and make it edible. So what's that in the picture on the right, dear reader? Baby broccoli? How does that get into the mix? Well, your guess is as good as mine to be honest, because it doesn't come in the packet, and it doesn't form part of the instructions either. A mystery.

This, then, is a poor substitute.

The next place where the Americans have got it wrong is... sausages. Who would have thought you could mess up a sausage? If I'm being honest, what we have here is a sin of omission rather than anything else: the Americans have no idea of the magic that can be conjured by the words "pigs in blankets" or "sausage rolls". So what did we do? Well, we made our own.

The classic British pigs in blankets are chipolatas - Americans, that's a short, thin French sausage - wrapped in a perfectly-fitting rasher of streaky bacon. Here in the US, you can't get chipolatas - the closest we could get is something called "pork links", which is what in the UK you'd call a "small sausage". And of course bacon here only means streaky bacon; in fact what's sold here as bacon would probably get chucked away in the UK, because it's more fat than meat. Anyway, put these foods together and I made what I started calling "pigs on steroids in blankets", which was essentially a normal-sized sausage wrapped in a big bit of fatty, salty American bacon. Come to think of it, "pigs on steroids in blankets" is probably literally correct, but that's by the by.

This was OK, but again, not the real thing.

So what did we get for Christmas this year? Well, with only presents from each other, it was a little more low key than usual, and quite enjoyable for it. It became something of an excuse to exercise a few in-jokes, for example this:

Or as Helen put it, "This sounds like something we would do - don't go getting any ideas".

We've also been looking at a few things lately and saying, "We should get that - when we go back we'll be the only people in the UK with such a thing", and that's how I came to buy Helen this:

So what is this? Well, it's a cornhole board, which is an American, er... well I'd call it a pub game. The basics are this: you throw 1lb bean bags at a hole in an inclined board, from 27ft away. The scoring system is surprisingly complex, and there's some pretence that tactics are an important part of the game. Also, the pros seem to spin the bags in flight, throwing them something like a frisbee, rather than just chucking them underarm as you might be tempted to do. Think of it as a cross between crown green bowls and Aunt Sally.

So here you see, dear reader, our Christmas was a cross between British culinary tradition, and American recreational pastime. Such is the way of the expat; Merry Christmas to all of you, wherever you happen to be!