I didn't have the sort of childhood Christmases I can get nostalgic about, so in the last few decades my small family has created our own traditions - the tree, decorations, stockings and food. I relish them - mostly because they're not like my Christmases as a child, which seemed, each year, to gather into one day everything that made my parents' marriage so unhappy. She was a great cook, gregarious, hospitable. He was jealous, antisocial, and didn't care what he ate, as long as it was meat and two veg (or, at breakfast, bacon and eggs). So Christmas was never going to work.
I formed my own early ideal of Christmas from books, including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women ('...ice cream, actually two dishes of it, pink and white,…
