Say 'cheese'

Say 'cheese'

Fairy lights and dodgy jumpers aren't the only things to make seasonal appearances this time of year. From the kitsch to the yeuch!, Una Mullally rounds up the food phenomena it just wouldn't be Christmas without

Cadbury's Roses

Potato Croquettes

Baileys

Selection Boxes

Yorkshire Puddings

While pork was being ripped from the shelves this week in a frenzied attempt at saving the public from dioxin-riddled rashers, I could only think of one thing. No. Christmas. Ham. No yummy honey glaze swirling over the clove-infused crackling, no parsley sauce, no ham in the St Stephen's Day club sandwich. I know the whole piggy industry is now going (pork) belly up, and people are losing their jobs and that, but no ham on Christmas Day? Nightmare. Alas, Christmas ham is one of the only truly lovely things to enjoy on Christmas, as the festive season tends to throw up (often, literally) an assortment of strange culinary misfires that grace us only in the depths of December.

Giblet soup

This is a concoction my father insists on making every year with the mangled innards of the turkey, which no one eats. Ever. Inevitably, the cat ends up jumping on the table and ridding the concoction of one of the larger giblets and legging it down the garden before horsing it into its fat face.

TOCROD (Tin Of Cadbury's Roses Overdose)

A strange body movement which I call 'The Roses Reflex' tends to take hold of most people over the festive season. The Roses Reflex is typified by a slow but repetitive bending of the arm and scooping of the hand into a tin of Roses whenever there is one in the vicinity. Over a prolonged period of time, this leads to the Roses Coma, symptoms of which include decreased mobility and digestive problems.

Potato croquettes

For most of my childhood, I thought potato croquettes were mythical wonderful things that could only be purchased at Christmas or when we went over to our aunt's gaff for dinner. Then one day, at a young age, I spotted them in a freezer in Superquinn and demanded them every day, to little avail. My mother has a strange reluctance to cooking potato croquettes on Christmas Day because WE HAVE ENOUGH POTATOES, apparently. Still, the beauty of them is, they're small enough to lash on a baking tray and throw in the oven when no one is looking.

Fruit-infused cheese

Who thought it was a good idea to squash loads of manky little chewy cranberries into a block of cheddar?

Baileys

For some reason, I manage to ingest inhuman amounts of Baileys throughout Christmas Day. It's a versatile drink, you know. A little glass beside the fire, a larger glass with ice later on, a dash in your coffee, lashing it over your Rice Krispies the next morning, that kind of thing. Baileys has now infused its booze with flavours (caramel is good, mint not so much) to make it extra Christmassy. Don't drink too much of the caramel one, however, as you'll end up puking all St Stephen's Day and making up some food poisoning story to the rest of the family out of embarrassment.

Selection Boxes

Everyone knows it would be cheaper to buy 10 items of chocolate in Tesco and just eat them, but that would be no fun. No, it's much better to get them packaged in a crinkly plastic tray with a cardboard game on the back that necessitates you finding your way out of an igloo maze with a cut-out reindeer. Selection boxes are secretly brilliant because of the strange arrangement of chocolates. You can safely nick a few bars from your niece's Dora The Explorer one without her noticing. And she probably doesn't even like Fudge bars anyway – everyone's a winner. Well, namely you.

Shape-shifting Christmas-themed food items

Plum pudding ice-cream! Brandy butter! Cocktail-sausage cranberry sauce! Mistletoe-infused cocktails! Butter biscuits in the shape of Christmas crackers! Authentic Christmas smell in a can! (Not strictly a food until you spray it near your sandwich.) Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yorkshire puddings

Tasteless chewy lumps of lard that are only barely redeemable if steeped in gravy and rendered unrecognisable from their original form. The attempted baking and subsequent fire in the oven and other parts of the kitchen once led to a Christmas Day row so epic that no one in my household is now even allowed to mention or reference the 'Y' word.