This Christmas more is more: why we're going kitsch in the kitchen

This year we’re taking it back to the kitsch, maximalist Seventies on our dining tables, says Annabel Rivkin
Annabel Rivkin7 December 2017

Are you dreaming of a slightly cynically styled, Scandi-chic, pared down, good-taste Christmas?

A Christmas that starts with a green juice and winds up with some meditation? A mindful, middle-class, Instagram-ready heap of Christmas wellness? Surely not.

We at ES Magazine do not need to remind you that everything has gone a bit tits up recently. That the world feels rather as though it’s going to hell in a handcart. And so why not wrap that handcart in tinsel, crack out the pineapple hedgehog and just have a blowout? Never has there been so much ‘self-care’ knocking about, and yet, never have we felt so anxious. So out of control. So threatened. An antidote to all the pressure has to be a big old Seventies-style blowout. The tackier the better. It’s in the air.

Style be damned. Let’s celebrate. Let’s take everything over the top, above and beyond. From dispiriting elegance to gaudy, glitzy maximalism and way beyond even that.

Let’s drown the worry in brandy and set it alight. Let’s use Christmas to forget the politics and the suspicions.

Let’s pretend it’s 1974. Let’s Studio 54 it up. Actually, scratch that: let’s Abigail’s Party it up. Let every dress be velvet or sequins — preferably both.

Let every tree (and earlobe) groan under the weight of the multicoloured shinies and sparklies and home-made hideousities. Let every surface be festooned with prancing things and winking things and flashing, waving, leaping things. Let’s set up bars in our front rooms, whisk up colourful cocktails and drink them out of terrible glasses through twirly, swirly straws. Or better still, pineapples. Nothing gets the party going quite like a winter piña colada. Wheel out the blender, freeze the f***ers. Make people suck until their ears pop. Give them brain freeze. Such fun. The kind of fun that seeps into your spirit.

Let’s wear ugly, bright lipstick and kiss everyone we can catch and leave them smeared with drunky lip prints. Let’s play games. Stupid ones. Like when you go round the table thinking of song titles and replacing the word ‘heart’ with ‘cock’.

And the food? Well it’s not going to be Deliciously Ella now, is it? God forbid. It’s going to be funny. It’s going to look part Coronation Street, part Miami. It’s going to be camp as… well… Christmas. It’s going to be full of everything that’s bad for us. It’s going to be soul food. It’s going to heal through abandoned over-use of butter and booze and fun. In other words, this Christmas is going to be the most Christmassy Christmas of recent years. It has to be. We need it.’

Photographs by Aleksandra Kingo

Food styling by Lucy-ruth H athaway

Set design by Elena Horn

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