I do love Christmas. But I do have strict rules about the festive season.
The key rule is that the run-up to Christmas may not begin until I’m good and ready. Two weeks ago, sales assistants were looking at me anxiously and asking in a worried tone “Have you started your Christmas shopping yet?”
To which I usually give an answer along the lines of “I would, but I have sworn that I shall not begin shopping until the Dark Lord rises again. But, soon.”
I’m not a last-minute shopper. I only ever brave the crowds by necessity, when business or sickness or life gets in the way. Equally, I don’t buy gifts in the summer. While I commend the impressive forward planning, summer festive purchasing is a little too clinical for my liking.
Rather, I look to an expert on such things to select the right moment.
And that expert is Martha Stewart. Felon or no, she knows how to plan the crap out of stuff. She is my go-to source of advice for the optimum time to step into Christmas.
You see, she can’t plan for Christmas too early, because she is too busy with home-made Halloween treats and 26 things to shove in a turkey for Thanksgiving. Only once those holidays are over do we get to Christmas. Which is how it should be.
November 16 is when my Martha Stewart Christmas Checklist appears every year in my tickler file. Week by week, a sensible entry to the Christmas season.
It’s such a gentle run up that I almost – almost – get to 13 December and find myself baking cookies for a non-existent cookie swap. What IS that? Who swaps cookies? Don’t you just eat them? Heck, if I had any silver, I would polish it on 17 December.
But, I do add my own tradition to Martha’s Christmas schedule. Every year, the start of the Pieraccini Christmas season is marked by the symbolic ordering of a Starbucks Gingerbread Latte. With all the trimmings. Whipped cream? Keep it coming, my good barista. And don’t forget the crumbly ginger bits if you know what’s good for you. Here is 2015’s Gingerbread Latte. And 2017’s, bare of crumbly bits. And finally 2018’s, clearly responding to the irate crumbly bit feedback of 2017.
Some 19 years ago, in the early days of me and Mr H (see our tale of cheesy puffs for more background), he introduced me to Starbucks, and more generally the world of outrageous coffee.
I had only ever experienced super-strong Italian coffee, drinking espressos from around the age of 6. But this world of syrupy-whip-double-shot-extra-hot-hold-the-foam was a whole new world to explore! Mr H had just returned from a trip to Seattle and dazzled me so with his worldly coffee knowledge, and one of our first dates was in Edinburgh’s first Starbucks, on Lothian Road. And somehow the first Gingerbread Latte of the year became our thing.
This week I had my first Gingerbread Latte of 2018. Christmas may, gently, begin.
MOZZARELLA BITES 