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Christmas is coming, la la la. Personally I don’t celebrate Christmas, for a number of reasons. I object to the crass commercialism of the season; I’ll buy presents for people when I feel like it, not when I’m told to, thank you very much; and, for the non-religious, Christmas is supposed to be a “family time”. If you’d met my family, you’d understand.

That said, I have no problem with a slap-up dinner shared with people I like, and I’m quite happy to co-opt someone else’s festival to give me an excuse to have one. So much of our shared cultural experiences are based on food anyway. I’m merely eliminating the window-dressing and concentrating on the main event.

Christmas is a brilliant time for food. The German Market here in Edinburgh is selling mulled wine, mulled beer, mulled juice, and mulled punch. Basically, if anything can be mulled, they’re mulling it. And there’s stollen and gingerbread and bratwürst and marinated pork steaks and bratkartoffeln and leberkas. Leberkas, for those of you who don’t know, is a sort of square luncheon meat that’s sliced and lightly fried, served with a sweet mustard. It’s nice, but it always amuses me that, every year, the Germans come over here and sell us spam fritters. It’s their fault we had to invent them in the first place.

Outwith German cuisine, there’s turkey—or goose if you can afford it—and stuffing, and mince pies and jam tarts, and roast potatoes (universally cooked in goose fat since Nigella took a stand a couple of years back), and little sausages with bacon wrapped around them. I’m a professional cynic, and I’m getting a bit excited about Christmas just writing this. Perhaps there’s something to this whole winter-festival thing after all.

And then there are sprouts. You can always tell when it’s Christmas, because there are sprouts. We never eat them at any other time. I firmly believe that nobody likes sprouts. All the people who commented otherwise on the Gordon Ramsay debacle are either mistaken or, hopefully, figments of my imagination. Seriously: people who like sprouts. People who like sprouts. No, it’s simply impossible, the product of a diseased imagination. What had I been smoking?

And then, once Christmas is over, there’s four days of turkey sandwiches and another week after that of turkey soup. People deride this, and it’s treated as if it’s a standard hilarious thing that happens at Christmas. I’ve got no problem with it. I just find it odd that people know how to save food and use leftovers for one week of the year, and then forget all about it for the other fifty-one.

I’ve just taken delivery of my shiny new oven, which has a light in it and everything, and a glass door that you can actually see through (for now), so I’m thinking about baking a ham this year. It’s not exactly high-science cookery, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I have fond memories of childhood Christmases, sitting in front of The Philadelphia Experiment, carving off great chunks of clove-studded pig and smearing them with some sort of port-based sauce. That, for me, is what Christmas is all about.