My Christmas begins at 3pm on Christmas Eve when I turn on Radio Four to hear the Festival of Carols and Nine Lessons. At the same time I pour the pink champagne. Already on the plate is black bread and wild smoked salmon. The colours are as good as the taste.

Real food is a hundred times better than lots of food. Eat less enjoy more. Wild salmon is dry and taut, not damp and flabby. The chewy black bread and the taut salty salmon make the mouth concentrate. If you hate champagne drink vodka.

In Accrington in the 1960’s, living in a two-up two-down – no car, no phone, an outside loo and a coal hole- - we began Christmas in much the same way: Bread, homemade, coarse as a car tyre. Smoked eel, crunchy like grated glass. Cherry brandy - not de Kupyer bought off a shelf - but the elixir of life; morello cherries from a tree in the yard, steeped half a year at the back of a cupboard on the way to Narnia.
It was another world.

We were poor but so was everyone else, so Christmas was not competition or consumerism but an unlikely communism – practical not political, where what one family had was shared with another, and we offered the Cherry Brandy, and the sprouts on stalks from our allotment, and the apples kept in newspaper to make sauce for the bird, and in return we got eel, and a pudding made in a cloth.

It was a hard specked cannonball of a pudding. It split more like a segmented orange than anything made of flour and dried fruit. I make my own puddings these days, but they are soft, sensitive, post-modern affairs that don’t need boiling for hours before they speak to you. It’s a time-thing isn’t it? Who has hours to boil a pudding? Now there is more pudding and less time. Then, there was not much pudding but a lot of time.
Enough to pluck a goose.

On December 21st every year my mother went out in her hat and coat– she wouldn’t say where – while my father and I strung paper chains, made by me, from the corners of the parlour cornice to the centre light. When my mother returned, in what always seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather, she had a goose half in half out of her bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody could remember. She gave it to me –goose and dream – and I plucked the feathers into a bucket.

Goose is a wonderful meat providing you cut off the neck fat first, and drain the melted fat off throughout the cooking, leaving enough to roast the potatoes. The drained fat should be skimmed and kept in jars and used in the robust fat-friendly way that the food-assassins hate. Fat is fine. Not trans-fats, not factory-fats, but good honest ordinary fat. I’d rather have my potatoes cooked in goose fat, than boil my spuds and scoff chocolate biscuits later.
At Christmas we ‘re told people pile on between two and five pounds, but why? Real food does not make you fat. That’s all there is to say on the matter. Fake food – the processed, pulverised, pre-chopped, pre-washed, packaged over-priced pap sold as low calorie convenience food, makes you miserable as well as fat. We eat more of it because we aren’t really eating at all. The Christmas guzzle isn’t about plenty – it’s about panic. All that money, all that food, and all you get is hyper kids, constipation, and a waistline.

The less is more is very good for food. Less, but the best. Less, but you what love.

My favourite high-calorie Christmas treat is a rum-sodden Christmas cake. You only need a month ahead to make this, spiked with nuts on the top so that it looks a round hibernating little animal. Eat it slice by small slice, with a piece of proper white Stilton, and a cup of short strong black coffee – bit of rum in it if you like. Have this for breakfast, go for a long walk, and pack in your pocket a bottle of cider, a wedge of chicken pie, and a fresh apple. I swear you will not put on an ounce, and nothing will be better than those tastes in the cold damp air.

Christmas is a chance to enjoy shopping and cooking, so don’t turn yourself into a pretzel. Order your meat from a real butcher, get your veg from the market, and make your own little savouries, cakes and pies.

Mince pies and cheese straws are as easy as keeping goldfish. All you need to do is to pour yourself a drink before you start, put the radio on, and remember that while the pastry is having a cooling rest in the fridge, you get half an hour to do your emails or write some Christmas cards, then, when the pastry is fit to roll, you will be relaxed and ready for another glass of wine.

Christmas can be a time-zone oasis, where you can actually do what you what to do, eat what you what to eat, and re-discover that time spent cooking and eating, the pleasure of ingredients and tastes, is better than endless nibbles, dips, sauces, and snacks.

Kids love making pastry – something about getting their hands in the flour and water, and messing with cutters. I do a great big batch, and use some for simple canapés – what’s nicer than a tiny tub-boat of pastry filled with mushrooms and bacon, or cream cheese and fresh chives, and what is more satisfying than miniature mince pies? Use an espresso cup as a cutter and lay a simple cross of pastry on the top – no lids.

If life is too short to make pastry, then life is too short to live at all. It bothers me that we never have time for, or are always being ‘saved’ from doing things that are relaxing and fun. Cooking is great. Food shopping is a pleasure in itself. I don’t shop in supermarkets because the chilled and packaged experience depresses me, and I come out suffering from trolley-trauma – that dazed slightly assaulted feeling of too much and not enough.
I decided to open a little shop on the ground floor of my house in London simply because I like real food. Harvey Cabaniss, the top trained chef who has taken it on and made it his own, will be roasting chestnuts by the open door, serving pheasant and black pudding soup, and baking suckling pig. Outside there are figs, dates, oranges and lemons, all the colours and smells of Christmas.

We need colours and smells, touch and texture. We need real life, which is usually a bit messy, and never comes ready-washed.
My goose is still on its feet – but not for long, though I do go and see her at the farm, and soon I will be chopping, gutting, skinning, plucking, using innards to make terrine, and rough-blending the sage and onion and breadcrumbs done in the oven that makes the whole house smell like Christmas.