The Nigel Slater Christmas Chronicles readalong 2025 - Part 2

[RainbowZebraWarrior]

Hello all, and welcome to Part 2. We Continue our CC journey.

For anyone who has not already had the pleasure, the annual Nigel Slater Christmas Chronicles read along is a real time annual MN tradition.
The Christmas Chronicles (Notes, stories and 100 essential recipes for midwinter) book began on 1st November.

We continue to read along and comment with the book which is set out in diary form. I will make a post each day (or let you know if there is no entry on a particular day)

Some regulars to the thread already have the book. For anyone new, it's a challenge to see of you can pick up a bargain. Vinted has come up trumps in the past, as has ebay. A rare and precious charity shop find is always a bonus. Don't forget, you can also listen along to Nigel's dulcet tones via Audible.

So, welcome to old friends and new, and don't forget that reading by candle light is particularly enjoyable. Cire Trudon may be one of Nige's candles of choice, but it's somewhat pricey. We don't discriminate against other less expensive brands - even if they are NVN (Not Very Nigel)

Pull up a chair, light a candle, grab a cosy blanket and join in!

Love that advent calendar @sbplanet I got lucky a few years ago with a similar one my local charity shop were selling for 50p. It comes out every year just like the one I had in the 70s.

@GlomOfNit I caved and bought M&S beauty this year after a break last year. Bonne Maman sounds like a much more sensible option. Fingers crossed you get an advent window slot!

@WeMeetInFairIthilien that's an incredibly long day. I am, as always impresses with your ealy starlit run. I noticed Jupiter was back in their seasonal position last night and shall look forward to seeing it every night for the next couple of months. My mother always says Jupiter hangs in the sky. What was the Crabby bargain if you don't mind me asking? I've been looking after the bargain threads lately but not always managed to read all the posts.

Love the domino story @ihavebecomecomfortablynumb my DD was taught to play dominoes by her nursery teacher and is formidable. Her teacher always said it was the best way of getting kids to do maths in their head. She was right as DD is top of her class in that respect.

Ooh I would loved to have heard your interview @Bimblesalong I suppose we all have a phone voice, but I remember being so embarrassed after my Masterchef episode went out as folk who knew me asked if I'd had elocution lessons!! Feel a bit sad now that I felt the need to 'disguise' the geordie lilt.

Crabby is a silicone crab 🦀 which sits on the side of the saucepan and holds the spoon!

My littlest keeps trying to take it. I got it from Amazon Haul, when there was the 70% off.

It's a lovely little bit of whimsy, and has been holding the spoon for set testing

Think my photos are still under review.

You can see the jelly is almost at setting point, through the steam

The algorithm knows I have been looking at advent calendars and has decided I might want this extremely sensible one 😐😟😂

That's funny, "25 days of festive hydration."

Happy birthday to your DD @RainbowZebraWarrior and go carefully in that ice.

Very frosty here too.

Nooooooooo way - I'm from Dalkey as are my people! Though living in the UK now. I went to Loreto - had lovely nuns.

I bought my SIL the Bonne Maman calendar as an actual Christmas present last year. It has some unusual flavours, and the small jars means they're not hanging around for too long. Went down very well, so I've got her another one this year. We're both now at the age where we want things we can "use up".

Happy birthday to your dd @RainbowZebraWarrior - all this Advent calendar talk is reminding me I have a Durance tealight one stashed away that I picked up in the January sales! I love these German Christmas market chapters and am feeling compelled to repost my pics of the brush stall at the Gendarmenmarkt market in Berlin from our snow-sprinkled visit to DS a couple of years ago.

That stall! 😍There's a very wanky shop in Oxford called 'Objects of Use' which is divine to mooch in - it feels 'curated' and I'm absolutely sure they'd say that 😂 and everything has a provenance. Handmade brushes for specific tasks from Germany and Japan, hand-turned brass pencil sharpeners, five types of feather duster for different jobs, beautiful carved schnapps cups in birchwood, etc etc. (I do actually buy a goat hair face powder brush in there every couple of years.) Your brush stall is the real deal (and much less pricy)!

I'm deeply envious of anyone who's been to a continental Christmas market. I really long to do one or two.

Dd1 and I were thinking of going to the Cologne Christmas market this year but one thing and another prevented us - maybe next year...

I'm afraid I caved and bought the M&S advent calendar. I share it with the DDs, so we divvy up the spoils and don't end up with half a dozen things we would never use (DDs are a bit young to bother with 'neck firming gel' and I have so much hand cream already). DD1 also has a tea advent calendar and I got DD2 a Wallace and Gromit.

And hail to my fellow 'phone voices' - my story on that theme is that I phoned Saturday Superstore as a child to ask a question of a new Blue Peter presenter. Mike Read asked me if I'd consider the job and said I had a 'good voice for it' <preening emoji>.

'Wanky shops' puts me in mind of Edina telling Patsy in Ab Fab that she was going to open a shop and dress the window in huge swathes of white chiffon and terracotta pots. Patsy asks what she will be selling and Edina replies "Um, swathes of white chiffon and terracotta pots?"

My mother and nine of her sisters all went to the Loreto, from 1920 through to the 1940s. When my mother died, we found a letter to her from one of the nuns that she had obviously written to regularly after she left about the birth of her youngest sister my Auntie Berna... the whole conversation was about her being called after a very new saint, as Saint Bernardette was only canonised in 1933... so who knew my granny was such a modern woman!

My advent calendar is something a bit different this year. I came across this little gramaphone (alas digital) with 24 mini records to play, each one with a different festive tune. Some I am familiar, with but quite a few I've never heard of so will be nice to hear each morning.
Annoyingly just noticed it is on a black friday deal but we have to order things so far in advance on to the island to make sure they arrive on time!

That sounds amazing @cocoya!

I would like to be the sort of person who has special artisan brushes for specific jobs - I bought a really nice book a while ago about Japanese 'housekeeping', which talked about all the different brushes and containers etc they use. The book was sadly lost in a spare room flooding incident along with lots of others (an interesting way to have to 'get over' the fact you were someone who never got rid of books - I'm still not entirely over it) - I might try to re-find it...

It's very frosty and cold here this morning - beautiful, although the cold is not agreeing with my lingering post-COVID breathlessness. I'm off out for a massage shortly (having also listened to A Thousand Feasts recently, I enjoyed Nigel's descriptions of different massages he's encountered), then bundling myself up on the sofa.

I've fallen behind in my CC reading this week. Mainly because DH has been off work and (as much as I love him) is always bloody hanging around so I've missed my time on my own in the mornings and when I get home from work to light a candle and read the latest entry. Today, however, I've caught up. Very pleased to have read some of my favourite chapters this morning (I feel like I ahve said this on every post. Who am I kidding? They are all my favourite chapters). I love Nigel's description of cold, snowy mornings in the city and the ghostly footprints of foxes and nightclubbers.

I think I say every year on this thread that I really like the sound of the lamb boulangerie dish and this will be the year I make it... Still haven't, but maybe this year...

I really want to like christmas pudding. I don't get on with dried fruit, or worse, candied peel, at all. But I love the smell of the pudding and the way Nigel describes the pudding in the book is intoxicating and really brings home how much I am missing out by not taking part in this part of christmas tradition. My mother also hated dried fruit and peel but she, apparently, made an epic pudding, despite never taking a spoonful herself. She used to make them for other family and friends as well as for us. Perhaps I should be more like her and embrace the making of the pudding, even if I have no desire to eat it? Although, it's probably a waste of time and effort - once mum's baking days were behind her and most of the pudding-eating family were gone, I took to buying a pudding from M&S every year but more often than note, there was around 3/4 leftover - we're just not a christmas pud family so now I don't bother at all.

Last year, we spent a few days in Munich just after christmas - the markets were wonderful and I'd love to have the time and money to take a trip to Germany every year at this time to experience this. I bought some beautiful wooden ornaments and little christmas village pieces and very much looking forward to unwrapping these and having them join my christmas decorations from this year onwards. I also visited the Edinburgh Christmas market earlier this week and have to say that I was impressed - the last few years have been a bit lacklustre, IMO, but this year it seems really well put together - maybe it was my mood, maybe it was the perfect cold, clear evening, but it felt properly christmassy and lovely. There is also a stall serving spaetzle, which made my very happy - even more so when I read Nigel's entry today and saw his recollections of eating this at the Cologne market. The Edinburgh spaetzle was nice, and I also enjoyed a gluhwein, although I miss the days when the market had a more German-theme in general, rather than the odd stall. I particularly miss the warm pretzels.

I think a few posters here know Edinburgh well and I wonder if anyone else remembers the brush shop which used to be on Victoria Street. It was such a wonderful slice of old-worldliness and I used to love stopping by to gaze in the window and at all the brushes hanging on the outside of the shop - like Nigel, amazed that so many different brush types exist for practically any purpose you can imagine. I think it closed in the early 2000s and I'm still sad about that.

RZW - hope your daughter has a wonderful birthday.

Hello again all and thank you for lovely posts, photos and seasonal musings. ❄️

I'm enjoying this cold, crisp weather; we have bundled up and gone on some lovely bracing walks. ❄️

Oh, we have that one! I bought it (possibly after a rec on MN, in fact) a few years ago to put a disc into DS2's calendar (alongside a sweet). He's profoundly autistic/LDs and I thought he'd dig it. Unfortunately he did not and seems to hate the very sound of it. I love it and play it to myself when he's not around. It's German so lots of the tunes are Christmas hymns you might not have heard of (I hadn't) but it's very quaint and sweet.

PricklyBob I can never get ANYTHING done when DH is working from home, and he doesn't even want the radio on. I sometimes think our marriage won't survive his retirement but that's a bit off yet!

I do love hearing about Christmas markets. In my head, I want them (the ones in Germany, anyway) to be full of authentic stalls selling wooden ornaments and toys, glass decorations, hand-poured candles and those amazing 'puffy' iced gingerbreads. But I do wonder if some of them are being infiltrated by tat stalls. I'm sure the big ones exercise rigid quality control!

I have quite a collection of German wooden and ceramic decorations and in years when we haven't had kittens or boisterous young cats I've had them spread across the mantle. Some of them are from stalls from UK markets, mostly I think I've had lucky charity shop finds! (as with the Cologne market gluhwein mugs I use in December.)

Our 'local' market used to be Oxford and it was quite nice in a quiet way: wooden cabins, a couple of trees, music, and mostly the same stalls year after year (I used to love the one run by Russian nuns who came over here with hand-painted wooden ornaments!). But a few years ago, the organiser, faced with some truly incomprehensible stubbornness from the town council over temporarily re-routing the cycle path so it didn't zip right through the middle of the market, decided she couldn't run it safely any more. Now it's a sad shadow of its former - well not 'glory' - self and is housed in plastic gazebos and tarpaulins and there's NOTHING Christmassy about it at all. No gingerbread, decorations, German anything apart from some bratwurst and gluhwein stalls.

I have a moan about it every year!

I worked in Oxford briefly and remember the christmas market fondly - sad to hear it has changed for the worse.

I've now done two "proper" markets/German cities - Berlin in early December around 12 years ago, and Munich just after christmas last year. There is some of the tat you would find at any market, in any country, but on the whole, I would say that the majority of offerings are the stuff of dreams - and the food and drink is so much better. My absolute favourite thing from a German christmas market is Quarkballchen and every year I hope that I will find a stall in a local market - alas, it is not to be.

I've seen those nuns at Winchester Christmas market @GlomOfNit ! Maybe not the very same ones though. (Nun theme has really taken off here this year .)

And @cocoya has reminded me why this thread can be a bit of a disaster for me - I now neeeed that musical advent calendar .

Our youngster's school friends have updated the intricate laser-cut wooden tree decorations with 3D printed versions - I get one (to support inventive young enterprise) each Christmas fair (only two more left) - for some reason our teen has managed to wrangle that he "can get anything he likes 3D-printed for free" from them, think they basically rule the 3D printer and supplies, he's never needed anything and I tried asking why he gets stuff free, but it was clearly on a need to know basis, and the response was a "you know" shrug. No I don't know sweetheart which is why I am asking.

Still don't know.

Not sure I will ever need to or just ever need to!

(They did make grandma a made to measure star for the top of her small tree - at a cost to me - so I have to pay for items but he doesn't........) such is our life.

Ooh I also love the gramophone advent. I mustn't though. We already have a random and extensive advent calendar collection.

So cold and achy, but It's been a productive day and I've also made a cake for DD. Thanks for the birthday wishes for DD btw. I'll pass them on to her as I did last year and she was thrilled that the lovely people on 'Mum's Nigel Club' wished her Happy Birthday. I'm just waiting for her outside school, and after a quick trip to the library (again!) we will be going home for present opening, stove lighting, hot chocolate drinking and takeaway ordering! 😋

Happy Birthday to RZW's DD. Sounds like the perfect birthday evening.

The gramophone does only seem to have one volume, which is loud, so we’ll see if DH shares the enthusiasm! My DS is 5 this year so hopefully that’s old enough for him to be gentle with it. I found a huge bag of hot wheels cars at the charity shop so going to make him a calendar with a car each day, though I am unsure if he will be able to resist the temptation of getting them all out at once.

Really enjoying reading all of the Christmas market experiences and making a note of all the things to look out for when we eventually make it to one.

Happy birthday to RZW DD! Hope you all have a lovely evening

Happy birthdayto your DD @RainbowZebraWarrior ! Sounds like a fabulous evening.

It's very cold indeed here, we've been to feed the little birds in our allotment, and break the water in the wildlife pond.