How do you do Christmas in China, including cooking a ‘proper’ English Christmas dinner to impress the in-laws, with such a different palette of ingredients and only a small electric oven and two gas rings to play with? The answer turns out to be, in part, that you get your mum to come and stay, bringing with her a nativity set, a Christmas cake and pudding, stollen, home-made mincemeat and the components of ‘make your own’ Christmas crackers. Don’t tell the airline about the latter – it hadn’t occurred to me that cracker pulls contain a tiny amount of explosive material! All that is, of course, alongside a suitcase full of presents from family who usually have no way of sending gifts… 

I think we pulled it off! My first Christmas out of the UK since we lived in Nigeria thirty-five years ago was lots of fun and Casper is at the perfect age to be introduced to some of our more bizarre traditions.  For the first time he left out a mince pie and a glass of Baijiu for Santa and his reindeer (what’s a reindeer, Grandma?) and he was delighted with the contents of his stocking, even if a little sad that it hadn’t been filled up again on Boxing Day morning! Casper and I were awake long before everyone else (and in time to catch some of the Midnight Mass contingent at home, before they went to bed) and watched the NORAD ‘Santa tracker’ to see Santa Claus’s progress across the globe.  I suspect that left Casper more confused than ever – ‘Why is he not landing?’ – but at least he now knows what a reindeer looks like! 

We more or less managed to stop Casper immediately ripping open all the presents which had appeared under the tree overnight and persuaded him to spread out the unwrapping process a bit, enjoying his new books and games one by one rather than opening everything at once. The inflatable Christmas tree was a big success (thank you Rosie!), particularly as it doubles up as a very throwable rocket!

I couldn’t find a child-friendly church service nearby, let alone one in English, so we opted for the secular option, taking Isla out on her first adventure; a quick lunch at the noodle shop on the way to Casper’s school.  I must admit, I’ve missed bowls of spicy noodles with all our healthy home cooking this time!

Kate’s parents arrived mid-afternoon for Christmas dinner. Ed had made a nut roast on Christmas Eve, swopping out parsnips for readily available sweet potatoes and using Chinese cabbage instead of Savoy leaves to wrap it in.  Nearly everything else we needed can be sourced, for a price, from specialist European suppliers – British-style sausages and bacon for jumbo-sized pigs in blankets to keep the carnivores happy and cranberries to make sauce.  We pan fried Er Cai (literally, baby Pak Choy) with walnuts in place of sprouts and glazed some of the lovely, local deep red carrots. Potatoes are easy to come by here – China is the second largest consumer globally, these days – so we squeezed roasties into the oven alongside the nut roast and sausages. A veritable feast. 

Kate’s parents seemed to really enjoy the food even if the crackers, which didn’t bang when we pulled them, were a bit of a puzzle.  Taking anything vaguely firework related to China is definitely bringing coals to Newcastle, as I should have learned from last year when we were in the countryside for the Tomb Sweeping festival. And as for cracker jokes, they lose the little merit they have when you need to explain them word by word!

The most exciting moment came when I tried to flame the Christmas pudding, forgetting how fierce the gas rings are.  A whole ladle full of Baijiu caught fire straight from the flame and I promptly dropped it on the kitchen floor.  Fortunately, Ed as poised with a bowl of water for just such an eventuality and the puddle of flaming alcohol was extinguished before it could do any damage – fire is not really something to mess with on the 25^th floor of an apartment block!  The second attempt worked much better and delighted Kate’s dad.  Part of the problem was that this is normally Martyn’s job and I think I used far too much of the fiery spirit. We had homemade mince pies and Christmas cake too, the latter decorated by Casper’s fair hands – note his fingerprints in the icing! It wasn’t really his fault – an error in translation meant we’d ended up with the sort of stiff sugar paste you use to make decorative flowers for cakes rather than the softer fondant icing we were aiming for, and you did have to press the ‘sprinkles’ pretty hard into the icing to stop them falling off!

Our other Christmas festivities involved potluck meals with some of Ed and Kate’s friends and they  enjoyed the Christmas cake and mince pies too – one seven-year-old wolfed down half a dozen and soon forgot she was shy about being English speakers! I’ll have to make next year’s batch of mincemeat early so Ed can bring some back to Chengdu, if they come to the UK next summer.

Kate has been getting lots of gentle teasing from Ed about not following the rules Chinese women are supposed to adhere to after childbirth (‘sitting the month’); she didn’t last long eating only confinement ready meals and has, shock horror, washed her hair and left the house without a hat rather than staying in bed. I can still remember the cabin fever I felt after the birth of my firstborn so would have struggled with this too.  Kate has, very sensibly, spent lots of time resting too but I think she’s glad that I don’t have many preconceptions about what she should and shouldn’t be doing. Talking to Ed’s friend, the mother of the seven-year-old mince pie fan, revealed just how bad it can be. She had both her mother and mother-in-law taking care of her after childbirth and her very conservative mother-in-law insisted she shouldn’t be washing her hands for a month!  

We’ve now had a couple of short forays out with three week old Isla, taking her to the local mall for a Hong Kong style lunch yesterday.  Sadly, the air pollution levels mean long walks with her in her pram, which I’d imagined being part of my role this month, have not been sensible but, when Casper is off Kindergarten for New Year it looks like things might be better. Hopefully we can head a bit further afield and maybe even get sight of the sun for the first time in a fortnight!

I decided it was time for some more challenging reading so have started Fundamentally, by Nussaibah Younis, a novel set in Iraq which deals with the issues around the so-called ISIS brides, marooned in tented camps, often with their young children, because no-one wants to take responsibility for them.