I want to write about Christmas

but how can we?

It’s the morning of December 24th and I would like to write about Christmas. I am in bed with a coffee and my fridge is full of food and I have a menu plan and we are hosting, and I want to write about it: the dishes I will cook, the drinks I will make. But I try to write about these things, and find I cannot, because there are 20,000 people dead in Gaza.

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Almost a decade ago now, I lived in Panama City, Panama. It was not my first time living in country where December was hot—I lived in Australia for 18 months previously—but the lack of wintry weather around Christmas never failed to feel weird. There was none of the cosying in, none of the ice bite, the frost. The incongruence of the blow-up snowmen on Vía España, when it was 31 degrees, was existentially depressing to someone from the relative north. We would have a week or so of actual Christmas in Toronto or Sheffield, but it would feel brief and unfinished, like a slice of cake scoffed.

My friend Juan Antonio’s mother is a cook, a food columnist, a cookbook author. The family has an enormous apartment overlooking a park, and owned a farm, and are well connected, well loved, in Panama as a whole. On my second Panama Christmas Juan Antonio’s girlfriend and I, as token blancas, were invited over to their apartment for their annual pre-Christmas tradition: Tamalada.

Tamales, for the unacquainted, are a popular Latin American snack made from masa (a corn dough) and traditionally stuffed with meat before being wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed (the singular form of tamales is actually tamal, with the e belonging to the -es and not the tamal-). They aren’t strictly Panamanian, having spread most likely from indigenous cultures in Mexico and Guatemala, but they are eaten everywhere in Central America and the Caribbean.

The traditional production of a tamal is a hell of an endeavour. You cook the maize (corn) to separate the hull from the grain. The grain is dried and ground to become masa harina (a process known as nixtamalization). The masa harina is turned into a dough, which is spread thinly on the banana leaf (or corn husk). The filling, which you will have been preparing since at least the day before, and which will usually consist of a very slow cooked meat, onion, garlic, chilli and spices, will be spread onto the dough and then the whole thing will be expertly folded. The banana leaf is tied around it, then the tamal, along with many more, will be steamed—or in Julieta’s house, boiled in a massive pot, manned, at least on this particular Christmas, by two clueless white women who couldn’t be trusted with any other part of the process.

The kitchen at Julieta’s apartment was full of people; this is a family task. Tamalada—the tamal-making day, or days—was a key part of their Christmas, and the dozens (maybe hundreds?) of tamales that resulted would be shared around their staff, their friends, their neighbours—everyone they knew. That day I had the time of my life, being told off for stirring the water too aggressively, having fun poked at my expense for being one of the few non meat eaters, the reason that the chickpea mixture was being used to stuff a handful of tamales. Watching the incredible skills of the family’s women as they pounded masa and folded leaves and shredded slow-cooked meat and folded spices into mixtures. At the end of the day I took my basket of veggie tamales out into the scorching heat of a Panama December day and felt like I’d had a real Christmas.

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I want to write about togetherness. I want to write about ritual and ingredients and symbolism and eating. I am writing about these things, in the same way that I have been going to work, and cooking, and sleeping, and reading and doing everything else that constitutes my life since October 7th. I want to do all this without the ache of self-disgust in my belly. But for eleven weeks, Israel—a country that annually receives more than $3 billion a year in military support from the US with $14 billion pledged in 2023; a country whose ‘right’ to commit genocide has been wholeheartedly repeated by both government and official opposition leaders in the UK—has been indiscriminately massacring civilians in Gaza. Neighbourhoods razed to the ground. Hospitals and schools and mosques and churches bombed. Children and adults maimed and killed and orphaned and entire families wiped out. I want to write about togetherness and how that is important. But 20,000 people are dead in Gaza, and while I write, this continues.

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This week my parents came to visit. I have been away from home for the majority of the last half of 2023, with another long trip coming up in February, and I wanted more than anything to be in my own home for Christmas. So my parents came to visit for the first time since before the pandemic, loaded with a frankly obscene amount of gifts and about forty home made mince pies.

On Tuesday I enlisted them in a task that I’d fallen behind on: biscuit making. I have been trying out Christmas traditions for about a decade, having spent six years flitting about the world in my twenties unable to keep any rituals going, and I have landed on one that suits me, borrowed from Italy: the home made biscuit box.

This is the second or third year in a row that I’ve made four or five different types of Christmas cookie—some Italian, some not—to be boxed up and handed out to friends, family, the people that provide our services. I hand a box over to our beloved postmen, who bring me books they think I’ll like when people leave them outside their homes and knock on the door every time they leave a package. I take one to the cafe round the corner, where the staff always ask about whatever project we have going on. I put them in the car to be taken to family members and friends and neighbours and all are delighted. It fills me with joy.

The rotation changes but the boxes always contain cuccidati, the fig cookie, most often made with dates instead as I’ve left it too late to find figs. There is always Amaretto biscotti, because they are my favourite. This year, there was gingerbread (gluten-free in this instance, to account for my coeliac dad), and baci di alassio, a naturally gluten-free cookie made from hazelnuts and cocoa, and filled with a chocolate buttercream because it might travel better than a ganache.

It is not enough to make all these cookies myself, I have realised. It requires more hands than mine alone; it needs people to mix the dates into the ground nuts, to roll out the dough, to do the inevitable mounds of washing up. My parents were enlisted because my mum can wield a piping bag like no one else, and my dad can’t leave a spatula unwashed for more than five minutes. The stress goes, the enjoyment increases, and you get to say that the boxes were a joint effort by all. Biscuit day, it turns out, it is my Tamalada.

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I want to write about Christmas without stopping short. I want to write about how much pleasure it can be to cook for people, with people, if you embrace the inevitable fuck ups and oven problems and take everything a little more lightly. I want to tell you to add something sharp to your Christmas plate, to pickle your red cabbage today so it is ready for tomorrow. I want to tell you that your mountain of stodge needs at least one acid, that vinegar is simply magic. But when I think about writing this, a wave of despair washes over me. I have cried twice today, and it is noon. How can we write about this when the war machine continues, almost three months now, nearly a quarter of a year, with no sign of stopping? There are 20,000 people dead in Gaza, and we talk about sprouts and biscuits and setting fire to puddings. We will be lighting candles and sitting round tables and pulling crackers while Israel is dropping 500 bombs per day, still, on Gaza; American-made bombs designed to shatter the bodies of people deemed not worthy of living, not worthy of a culture or a land or the protection of the rest of the world.

But of course, we will have our Christmases. I will write about these things; I have written about these things. You are reading these things now. We will be with our loved ones and we will appreciate it; we must. What we have is what everyone deserves to have: peace, pleasure, company, safety. To be able to experience togetherness whilst also remembering the people who are no longer with us. To not indulge in this wild privilege when others cannot feels obscene. So we will eat our roast potatoes and drink our fizz and maybe we will think of the horror of the last three months, and maybe we won’t. But it will be there, having changed us all somehow.

I will serve a plate of steaming food to the ones I love tomorrow. I will hand them gifts I have made and bought. I will have made biscuits and a tiramisu and a marmalade pudding and a roasted bird with people I love and they will be delicious. We will laugh and raise glasses and play games. My day will be marked by a wild and despicable gratitude. A pleasure, stained indelibly with guilt.

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Who is without echo?
An empire of nobodies
floods the market,

they come bearing
a fleet of arks.

- extract from […] by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, published in full here