🎄 Last year, I made the wonderful decision to read Dickens' A Christmas Carol before the holiday. This year, I read Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory and Hoffman’s The Nutcracker. Indulging in Christmas-themed reading is a ritual I will now continue to indulge for the foreseeable future. During my readings, I have noticed that one of the defining traits of well-written Christmas literature is the ability of the author to confer a sense of abundance and narrative overflow, particularly through generous descriptions of food. Observe the following:
A Christmas Carol:
Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mine-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry0cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
A Christmas Memory:
Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.
The Nutcracker:
A few steps brought them out upon the great marketplace, which presented a splendid sight. All the houses round it were of open sugar work, story rising over story; in the middle stood a tall sugar-coated cake tree, like a monument, and on each side of this a very skillfully made fountain spouted in the air lemonade, ginger beer, and other nice drinks; while into the basins below ran pure rich cream which you might spoon up at once without further trouble.
May all of your Christmas' be as abundant as such! 🍗🥓🥧🍖