Christmas at the cakehole
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Version 0 of 1. The sight of the first Santa hat in a public setting always reminds me of the way in which, over the festive period, the line between work and holiday becomes smudged. If you're lucky, and have a job that becomes more and not less enjoyable in the runup to Christmas – which, let's face it, depends on your tolerance for bauble earrings and having Noddy Holder scream down your ear every hour – there's satisfaction to be had in getting everyone's needs met in the time there is available. Everyone's got to have a turkey on the table. Twenty years ago, I was having the best Christmas ever. I had four jobs, three of which involved selling food and other festive comestibles (festibles?) to people who decried the demands of the season while loving every excessive minute of it. Working in a baker's shop on Christmas Eve, there was a unity of purpose between server and served, with nothing coming between us except great piles of cake. Come opening time, we were there with shovels at the collective cakehole. A lifetime loner, I finally felt part of the team. There wasn't time enough for anyone to dwell on my social awkwardness, or for me to dwell on it myself – we all just had to get on with it. From 23 December, as I'd known from working there the previous year, the queue for pork pie and cream scones starts at 7.30 in the morning, with most shops on the precinct empty of both goods and shoppers by just after lunch. By 9am, an hour after opening, we would find ourselves in a state of collective flow: greet, serve, transact, dispatch. Cooked meats flew off the slicer quicker and thicker than at any other time of year, and egg-stuffed, foot-long pork pies sold in heavy chunks, to be served with pickled cabbage. We were the merry enablers of Boxing Day gout. But there were other, more obvious benefits: there was no piped music in the shop, meaning we were free of the obligation to play Mariah Carey and Wizzard on a loop and saving the company a large number of workplace torture tribunals in the process. We were permitted to take off our hairnets as long as we wore Santa hats in their place. And at the end of Christmas Eve, anything with fresh cream in it – which meant copious sherry trifles – was divvied up between the staff. I had the responsibility of transporting the day's takings, which over the Christmas period would be a grand or more, unescorted to the post office around the corner in a carrier bag. Being in possession of large amounts of cash feels very good, right up to the moment where you are impelled by conscience to pay it into someone else's bank account. As if such perks weren't enough, I took up another job as an Avon rep – my entire family received stockings full of Casbah "fragrance" and miniature bath sponges. Pasties, pastries and pies, to George Orwell, were nothing more than "cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life"; to Richard Hoggart, writing about working-class Leeds in the 1950s, they bore proof of the working-class gift – the necessity – for finding pleasure where you can get it. It's about your view of nourishment: is it for the body or for the soul? The over-rich Christmas feast is an attempt to satisfy both at the same time. For this reason I can never go into a shop – even one that's got Noddy Holder screaming – at this time of year without being re-immersed in the sugary mania of Greggs on Christmas Eve. The rest of the year I think noble thoughts about the nature of collective purpose, but today all it will conjure up is the image of shovelling cake in the direction of a lot of happy mouths. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |