Mix well

When friends of 48 years message to say they are coming for coffee, you pull out a stop or two. Mrs M fetched artisan butter from the brewery shop. I made pastry using a no-faff method I picked up some years ago from an instructor with a memorably dry sense of humour on a bread-making workshop day given to me by our son.

The mincemeat was made 4 years ago - the last remaining jar. I remember listing all the ingredients of mincemeat, and the many countries they came from, and my head spinning at the thought of all the hands they had gone through, the transactions applied to them, the languages, the ethnicities, just to end up in my jar. The journeys they might have made: carried on shoulders and heads, loaded on to tractors or donkeys or camels, lorries, trains, boats or aeroplanes, with tickets and labels and certificates.

The damson jam is our own manufacture, from damsons picked during the warm days of autumn harvest. Fishing for stones requires patience and persistence.

The pastry cutters are a family heirloom, tarnished metal stored in a flimsy tin, a reminder of a childhood kitchen before plastic was ubiquitous

Mrs M and I rolled and cut and lifted and placed and spooned and egg-washed and sealed and pricked with practiced co-ordination

So at one level it's just a round of baking and a diary photograph that I take every year to mark the beginning of Xmas. At another, it's a collection of memories and stories and symbols, and a celebration of the complex, interdependent world we live in