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DETAILS
SIZE
A6 10.5 x 14.8 cm
BACKSIDE
Blank for your message
Soft and uncoated, that welcomes ink and holds it well
PAPER
MADE IN
The UK
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Handle with clean, dry hands to keep the print looking its best. Store flat in a drawer. Keep away from direct sunlight to preserve the colours over time.
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PAY WITH TWINT
Her flat sits two floors above a bakery. Every morning, before the first tram, the smell of fresh rye crust and warm cinnamon buns climbs the stairwell, slips in beneath the window sash and fills the living room.
She still keeps me, her old wooden nutcracker, in a shoebox. The tissue is newer. The smell of Christmas is the same.
On the first weekend of November she lifts the lid and takes me out before anything else. My red paint has worn thin at the elbows, and one Prussian blue eye has faded toward cornflower, but she never seems to notice. She stands me on the windowsill facing the square, where the town hall clock turns its gilded hands, just as she always has. From here I watch the market stalls rise, and all the stories come back to me.
The first, when she was four and fed me a hazelnut far too big for my jaw. The one when the cat swept me off the sideboard and my hat broke in two. Her father glued it at the kitchen table, and the seam still glints like a thread of frost. The one in her student room with a single radiator, when I travelled there in a woollen sock, wedged between her books.
And the year I went missing. My box came down. The tissue was empty. She climbed up to the attic and went through every crate: the Advent candles, the tangled fairy lights, the star for the top of the tree. Last of all she opened the box of ornaments, and there I lay among the glass baubles, packed away by mistake the January before. Goodness me, what a fuss that was!
I have cracked very few nuts in my life, but I have celebrated a great many wonderful Christmases, and I can hardly wait for this one to arrive.
PAIRS WELL WITH
PAY WITH TWINT
It came to you as a present, wrapped in a linen cloth. Your grandmother’s cookbook, which had belonged to her mother before her.
Open it and the years drift up from the paper: clove oil, browned butter, the bittersweet ghost of orange peel, a breath of vanilla trapped in the binding. The first pages are all Christmas dinner: roast goose, red cabbage, dumplings. You skip past them, straight to the desserts and biscuits. Not one recipe here has survived untouched. Every page has been annotated, adjusted, argued with.
The first is a gingerbread house, its plans traced from a women’s magazine in 1958 and pasted in with flour and water, every wall and roof panel measured in inches. Your grandmother has added a chimney in pencil and written boil the sugar for the windows until it turns amber. Beneath, a note about the icing: glue the roof the night before. Trust me. Then her own hand, rounder, quicker: Seville orange peel, to be candied in January and hidden until Advent.
A printed card from a packet of icing sugar, peppermint creams, corrected in pencil: too sweet, add lemon. Quince cheese that sets overnight into garnet squares. Butter biscuits stamped into stars and hearts, with a line added in your mother’s hand: let the children do the sprinkles. A few still cling to the page, tiny beads of coral, mint and lemon yellow, pressed into the paper by a sticky thumb. Rum truffles rolled in cocoa, with a note underlined twice: not for the children. You remember stealing three.
Rose and vanilla marshmallows, snipped into pillows with kitchen scissors and dusted in cornflour, with a reminder to drop two into every cup of hot chocolate after carol singing, where they slowly sink and bloom. And the candy canes, sugar pulled on a buttered marble slab and twisted with crimson, a recipe you have starred since you were nine and never once made. This might be the year.
At the very back lies a hellebore, pressed flat the winter your great grandmother married. Christmas roses, she called them, and every year she told their story: a shepherd girl with no gift wept in the snow, and where her tears fell, these flowers opened.
This year you sit at the kitchen table with your own pen. You write: ginger and sour cherry florentines, thin as glass. Then you close the book and reach for the marble slab. By Christmas the kitchen will smell of every page at once… caramel darkening in the pan, cloves pressed into oranges, cinnamon warming the windows, peppermint sharp as frost.
Outside, under the snow, the hellebores are opening.
PAY WITH TWINT
Long before he had a sleigh, he had a pocket full of oranges.
The old stories say Nicholas, a bishop in Myra, once dropped three bags of gold through a poor man’s window by night, so his daughters could marry. Over the centuries the gold became oranges, tucked into the toes of stockings, and the bishop grew a white beard, a red coat, and a laugh you could hear three rooftops away.
But oranges alone no longer fill his sack. So for weeks before Christmas, he makes sweets in his own kitchen. He boils sugar in copper pans until it turns amber, pulls it on a hook until it shines like silk, and twists in a stripe of cherry red. Each one he bends into a cane, shaped like the bishop’s staff he once carried. Beside them, meringues dry by the stove in rose and pistachio, blood orange slices are dipped in dark chocolate, and pink gumballs rattle into glass jars.
On Christmas Eve he sets out with all of it. No lane is too narrow, no village too far. Down chimneys, past sleeping cats, around the painted nutcracker standing guard on the sideboard. He fills stockings to the brim, leaves an orange in every toe, and is gone before the embers settle… almost. Listen closely and you might catch it, drifting back over the roofs.
Ho ho ho.
Write a few lines and send this card ahead of him, a small herald in the winter post. Somewhere above the rooftops, he is already on his way.