An English Christmas in Anatolia

What survives when tradition has to be improvised

Christmas approaches, as it does around this time of year. Between the writing of shopping lists and speculations on what to eat on the day, I find a moment to reflect on the Christmasy ghosts of days long past.

Back when Christmas in Hastings came with an outside chance that it might actually snow. Christmas cards hanging on strings, Quality Street tins so big and deep they seemed like they might never run out. Cheap tinsel adorned everything, the weeks before flipping through the Argos catalogue, dreaming of what toys might come. Every Christmas Eve, Star Wars: A New Hope played at about eight pm. Staying half awake all night, trying to catch Father Christmas sneaking in to drop a pillowcase full of presents at the end of the bed. Waking at the crack of dawn and starting to feel the presents, harassing the parents to get up, and being told to go back to bed for another hour. Finally, everyone is up, mugs of tea all round, and it’s time to rip through all the wrapping. Next, church, then Christmas dinner, Christmas crackers with awful jokes and paper hats. Roast turkey, pigs in blankets, and later Christmas pudding served in flaming brandy. Followed by a sleepy, lazy afternoon while stomachs settle, then a family game, probably something new that arrived from Santa. In the evening, cold cuts, pickles, cheese and biscuits, and then the majestic Black Forest gâteau and Christmas cake. It was the one time of the year when things seemed abundant: food, toys, time, and most of all, family.

A Christmas celebrated here resides upon your ability to manufacture it, albeit in a vacuum

Jump forward four decades to 2025, and I am an immigrant, living in Anatolian Turkey. 1,929 miles away from Hastings, on a different continent. Christmas doesn’t exist here in a cultural sense. I mean, they have decorations in the shopping centres, and Black Friday sales (which is an impressive marketing victory, seeing as there is no Christmas). But December 25th is a normal day and passes without anyone noticing. There are no Christmas carols or midnight mass, pork is a rarity and absurdly expensive. Turkey may or may not be available, although that’s largely irrelevant, as the traditional ovens here are far too small to fit a turkey. Christmas here is a foreign concept rather than a shared national mood. A Christmas celebrated here resides upon your ability to manufacture it, albeit in a vacuum.

So you may ask, why bother? It’s a fair question. On some level that I can’t quite express, it’s insanely important to me to give my son Christmases like the ones I grew up with. Christmas, after all, always was for the children. Of course, I am doomed to fail; some might argue it’s a ridiculous pressure to take upon oneself. More than most things, this feels like a test of my ability as a parent. At the back of my mind, there is a subtle guilt that the Christmas I create won’t match my memories. It’s a game of substitution and compromise: what can be recreated, and what can be disregarded.

In many ways, it’s a comical endeavour. Never has so much effort been expended trying to find Brussels sprouts, which frankly, no one likes but me anyway. I make mince pies from scratch and dream of the supermarket aisle back in England. I find a website where I can order a joint of pork, some bacon, and sausages for the pigs in blankets. It’s staggeringly expensive. I put it in the basket, the postage cost is added, and I delete it immediately. I repeat this procedure a few times whilst I accustom myself to the shock of paying £14 for 500g of bacon, £18 for an 850g loin cut, and £8 for eight English breakfast sausages. That’s a pound a sausage: a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill sausage. It’s not gold-plated, it doesn’t sing Christmas carols or do the Hokey Cokey. But it will sizzle in the pan and taste of England. Despite the extravagance, I somehow convince myself that it’s totally worth it. Imagine the crackling and the roast; my mouth waters already. Indeed, it is most certainly worth it.

Thinking back again, those grand Christmas memories from the 1980s were built on working-class ingenuity. All the food was hand-prepared; it wasn’t about abundance at all, but time and effort. Tiny budgets were carefully managed and stretched to create an illusion of temporary wealth, a sense of pride in the ability to provide a great Christmas for the family to share. Long before all the pre-packaged stuff that flies off the supermarket shelves these days. Long before we drowned it all in commerciality.

I suppose the kicker is that on some level, it doesn’t matter. I try my best every year, holding myself to unachievable standards. But the truth is, my son would be perfectly happy if I served cheese on toast and Doritos. He already has the essence of it, the excitement, the build-up; he starts asking how many weeks until Christmas the week after his birthday in September. I’ve kept all the letters he wrote to Father Christmas, and the ones that Father Christmas wrote back, admonishing him for any poor behaviour. The tradition survives intact, regardless of the distance, the time, the attention, the presence; these are the things that hold it all together, along with me inflicting a ritually humiliating defeat upon him over a game of Monopoly. For him, Christmas is the best day of the year, same as it was for me when I was a child.

There is one thing that hasn’t changed one bit. Much like the family cat we had when I was a young’un, my cat is here, traumatising our Christmas tree with psychotic glee at every opportunity. Some things drip with consistency.

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