5 British Christmas Essentials to Grab Before Marks & Spencer Closes
Ah, the Great British Christmas. Mince pies popping up in supermarkets before Halloween is over. The annual battle for the best Christmas ad. Keeping your fingers crossed for snow on Christmas morning. Long-forgotten family feuds resurfacing over the Christmas pudding. Falling asleep during the Queen's speech. Queueing for the Boxing Day sales at 4am.
While you can't completely recreate a traditional British Christmas in Beijing (which, now that we think about it, is possibly a good thing ...), thanks to Marks & Spencer, you can at least stock up on some British yuletide essentials. Sadly, it appears that Beijing's (and China's) Marks & Spencer is not long for this world, so get down there now and panic-buy as much festive crap as you can get your hands on.
Christmas just wouldn't be the same without these five things:
Chocolate coins
Stocking filler extraordinaire, chocolate coins make for the perfect Christmas morning breakfast while you're unwrapping your presents (repeat after me "I must detox in January"). Marks & Spencer sell theirs for a relatively reasonable RMB 25, and they're on a three-for-two offer until Christmas day.
Mince pies
Yes, they're called mince pies even though there's no meat in them, get over it. In fairness, the proto mince pie did contain a combination of meat, fruit, and spices, influenced by cooking methods and ingredients brought back from the Middle East during the Crusades. Today, the meat is gone and they're just a bloody good excuse to eat a bit of pastry IMHO. Pro tip: warm mince pies in the oven and serve them with brandy butter (basically butter beaten with confectioner's sugar and brandy).
Christmas pudding
My whole family adores Christmas pudding, so until I spent Christmas with non-relatives I had no idea that most people actually ... don't really like it very much. To be fair, I can see how the combination of dried fruits in a not-particularly-sweet pudding mixture, steamed and soaked in brandy – not to mention set on fire with more brandy before serving – isn't as appealing as, say, a chocolate gateaux, but this is nevertheless an essential on the British Christmas dinner table. Marks do them in several different sizes (get a big one, it makes for excellent leftovers).
Bottled Buck's Fizz
"Why bottle the world's easiest cocktail?!" I hear you cry. Yet for my family at least, no Christmas morning is complete without a bottle of supermarket Buck's Fizz, usually brought by a well-meaning aunt or grandparent. Suffering through a glass was fun when I was 16 and "not allowed to drink," but was definitely less so by the time I was 20 and had learned to appreciate a good glass of wine. For the sake of RMB 59 (less than the price of one cocktail in many of Beijing's fine establishments), you may as well get a few bottles in anyway – just for nostalgia's sake you understand ...
Cream Sherry
Sure to be the dustiest bottle in any liquor cabinet, it's a running joke in the UK that nobody drinks cream sherry (usually the brand Harvey's Bristol Cream) except for maiden aunts who "just have a little nip of sherry" and inevitably fall asleep before dessert. If napping before dessert sounds like something you can get on board with, grab a bottle of Mark & Spencer's pale cream sherry for RMB 89 (or use it to make a traditional sherry trifle).
More stories by this author here.
Instagram: @gongbaobeijing
Twitter: @gongbaobeijing
Weibo: @宫保北京
Photos: Robynne Tindall, Flickr
