THINK Christmas is all about premium food and drink? You’ve clearly never enjoyed the following British festive essentials:
Orange Matchmakers
High quality chocolate has no place in a traditional British Christmas. Instead, you must consume shards of a mysterious crunchy orange substance and chocolate that has only a passing acquaintance with cocoa solids, all crushed together into a skinny, brittle stick.
Bisto
Sorry Nigella, but if you made a proper gravy with port, red onion and star anise, Uncle Jeffery would spit it out in disgust. Instead, it is obligatory to use strange glutinous granules that have spent the best part of four years at the back of a cupboard and are liable to be made up of at least 40 percent mouse shit.
Nuts to crack
Why does your mum always insist on buying these largely impenetrable snacks which sit sadly in a bowl while everyone munches their way through nice things like Quality Street? At some stage your pissed brother will attempt and fail to crack one and they’ll be unceremoniously dumped in the bin on January 3rd.
Shop-bought mince pies
The inside is tooth-achingly sweet and the outside has the texture of sand. However, you’ll mindlessly shovel approximately 41 of these into your gob over the Christmas period, always with the same comment about not really liking them very much.
Christmas crackers
They have to be from a traditional British retailer, such as Iceland, and must feature a wafer-thin paper hat that rips immediately, a shit gift like a red plastic fish that curls up and dies in your palm, and a painfully bad joke that your dad will repeat at every Sunday dinner until next July.
A Cadbury’s selection pack
Don’t bother purchasing those artisanal dark chocolate florentines from Waitrose, because what everyone really wants are some familiar old favourites presented in enough plastic packaging to kill a whole family of ocean-dwelling turtles. It’s not Christmas until you’ve chewed your way through a Curly Wurly in front of the Queen’s speech.
