This Christmas more is more: why we're going kitsch in the kitchen

Let’s drown the worry in brandy and set it alight. Let’s use Christmas to forget the politics and the suspicions.

Let’s pretend it’s 1974. Let’s Studio 54 it up. Actually, scratch that: let’s Abigail’s Party it up. Let every dress be velvet or sequins — preferably both.

Let every tree (and earlobe) groan under the weight of the multicoloured shinies and sparklies and home-made hideousities. Let every surface be festooned with prancing things and winking things and flashing, waving, leaping things. Let’s set up bars in our front rooms, whisk up colourful cocktails and drink them out of terrible glasses through twirly, swirly straws. Or better still, pineapples. Nothing gets the party going quite like a winter piña colada. Wheel out the blender, freeze the f***ers. Make people suck until their ears pop. Give them brain freeze. Such fun. The kind of fun that seeps into your spirit.

Let’s wear ugly, bright lipstick and kiss everyone we can catch and leave them smeared with drunky lip prints. Let’s play games. Stupid ones. Like when you go round the table thinking of song titles and replacing the word ‘heart’ with ‘cock’.

And the food? Well it’s not going to be Deliciously Ella now, is it? God forbid. It’s going to be funny. It’s going to look part Coronation Street, part Miami. It’s going to be camp as… well… Christmas. It’s going to be full of everything that’s bad for us. It’s going to be soul food. It’s going to heal through abandoned over-use of butter and booze and fun. In other words, this Christmas is going to be the most Christmassy Christmas of recent years. It has to be. We need it.’

Photographs by Aleksandra Kingo

Food styling by Lucy-ruth H athaway

Set design by Elena Horn