In Australia, Christmas occurs in the height of summer. When I was young, our family always gathered at Gran’s for a hot traditional English Christmas Dinner in the middle of Christmas Day. It was normally around 2pm by the time we managed to sit down together.
In a tight schedule of early morning cups of tea, opening stockings and family presents, church for some, and picking raspberries for others, there was always the ham to be dressed. Each year Mum had a leg of ham cooked at a local bakery, and sometimes it was not delivered until worryingly late on Christmas Eve. Decorating it involved removing the skin, covering the fat with dried breadcrumbs, and whole cloves pegged out and pressed into the fat in a lattice pattern across the top. If we didn’t do that, another option was using toothpicks to secure rings of tinned pineapple with glace cherry centres over the ham, and basting the whole thing with a spicy glaze as it cooked just a bit more. Eventually a paper frill was pinned to the end of the leg, it was covered with a clean cloth and ready for the table.
That all sounds simple, and it was, but it always coincided with peak raspberry jam and bottling operations, so glass jars and bottles stood ready waiting, empty or full and cooling, on every flat surface in the kitchen. It was often impossible to find a working space for the ham, and occasionally that had to be done around in the dining room. All this added a certain level of stress in the kitchen on Christmas morning, given that we had to be clean, properly dressed and out the door with ham, raspberries and wrapped gifts, no later than 1-30pm in time for dinner at Gran’s.
In addition to our family of parents and we three girls, Dad’s mother, ‘Gran’, Dad’s brother John, his wife June and son Andrew, and Dad’s sisters Mary and Joyce were always there. Extras varied a bit. For many years Aunty Flo, an in-law of Gran’s, was present, as was ‘Uncle Ross’ though we only saw him once per year, and I’m still not entirely sure who he was. But he was kindly old man, quite ancient, and dozed off a bit now and then.
Despite background dramas, the ham was always superb, and leftovers went with us to Greens Beach on the 26th or 27th. There we enjoyed it for the next week or so if it lasted that long, though I at least was usually a bit sick of it by then. And, with tiny fridge freezers then, it was a case of eat it or lose it once it began to go off.