When I was a kid my favorite thing about Xmas was the food shopping trip to Fine Fare. Fine fare was a supermarket famed for it's 'yellow label' goods years before 'own label' ever became an idea that the posh stores would adopt.
Our local fine fare had been opened by 'plays a vet on TV' Christopher Timothy, who I'd been told flew in by helicopter - and what he opened was a real boon to the council estate on which we lived.
But at Xmas the shopping trip was different. My grandparent's would join us, there would be a Xmas movie to watch when we got home and I'd already have watch a puppet rat be mean to a puppet Gerbil (who was welsh) before leaving the house - so my spirits would be high.
The great thing about a Xmas shopping trip was that all of those shelves that had been off-limits during the year suddenly became accessible. Mr. Kipling chocolate fancies with a bit of cadbury's flake on the top? Throw them in. Woodpecker cider - it's Xmas.
The christmas shop gave me access to excess. To a world of abundence and permission that I didn't realize was commonplace for many of my friends. It seemed to me that the supermarkets magically filled for the holidays with weird, wonderful and only vaguely Christmas specific goodies - and yet (I now suspect) that whilst the tins of ham my have grown bigger and the biscuits developed hard, snow covered tins - the rest was purely permission to indulge.
We're heading out today to do our Xmas dinner shopping - and I know it won't be the same, but I'm still scanning the morning TV in search of a showing of a rat in a festive hat
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