Let’s face it: no one likes Christmas dinner. If that statement instinctively rubs you up the wrong way then I implore you to actually think about what you like about Christmas dinner. Is it the sudden appearance of turkey, an unwieldy bird that no one knows how to cook on account of it needing the literal birth of our Lord and Saviour for anyone to even attempt it in the first place? Is it that Christmas dinner is the apotheosis of the very British idea that chucking lots of stuff on a plate and hoping for the best is a reasonable substitution for an actual cuisine? Is it the alternative vegetable ideas cribbed from your favourite recipe columnist, desperate to find something new to publish in early December (Sichuan-style Brussel sprouts, “this year why don’t you try putting za’atar on the red cabbage?”), only for you to realise that none of them go with each other or the main meal? Is it the cranberry sauce, a condiment so vile it’s taken the money of Big Cranberry to fool us into believing that jam is an acceptable accompaniment to a roast dinner? If it’s the roast potatoes and gravy, then why not just have a standard roast? And if it’s not, and you really really think about it, wouldn’t you rather be eating just about anything else? None of this is new. AA Gill called Christmas dinner “the single most disgusting meal ever invented, with the exception of American Thanksgiving”. But where I differ from Gill is that I embrace the intrinsic badness of Christmas dinner as A Good Thing. Appropriately sized and delicious dinners are something I can have 364 days a year. On Christmas I want to know it’s Christmas, and if this means waging war on my own stomach by confusing it with two types of meat, 15 separate condiments, and a pudding more suited to being shot out of a Napoleonic era gun-ship than being eaten, then so be it. Christmas dinner is a ritual, and rituals – whether it’s the symbolic asceticism of the Passover seder, or the gastronomic release of iftar – are not supposed to be analysed on the grounds of how tasty they are. They are there to connect us, to provide some grounding, a sense of shared experience, even if that shared experience is passing out on the sofa, awakening only to forensically peel open all the good Quality Streets (the toffee finger, the pink fudge) before the rest of your family get to them. But there is another, more important function of the Christmas meal: it contains within it the seed for its own deconstruction. Deconstruction requires the knowledge of tradition – Coltrane had to make Giant Steps before he could make Ascension. So, too, must Christmas dinner be eaten before the most important meal in the culinary liturgical calendar: the Boxing Day snack. The Boxing Day snack – or more accurately, a series of snacks that take place over a continuous period of not-quite-time (because once the 25th has passed the concept of time temporarily warps and time-based words such as “lunch”, “tea” and “dinner” collapse into meaninglessness) – is where tradition bleeds into anarchy. It is the very point of having Christmas dinner in the first place. While the form of Christmas dinner is not to be tinkered with, the Boxing Day snack is about nothing but tinkering – the remnants of a vast dinner providing a palette from which it’s possible to paint your most base culinary desires. For some this is a family affair: every household has their own unique variation on what to do with a turkey, usually (for reasons unknown) led by a dad who sees it as their yearly calling to mask the taste of turkey in a pie or a curry. But this year, as our dinners have become more atomised, I’m more interested in our individual tastes. Boxing Day is when your imagination and creativity can suddenly run riot. Cold cut sandwiches are obviously a huge draw – I would usually benefit from two meats as my mum likes to cook both turkey and pork for anyone who doesn’t like turkey (which, no one has the heart to tell her, is everyone). The strong dark meat of turkey shines in these creations, where the refrigerated coldness of the meat is offset by its greatest asset – its hot skin – which can be crisped up under the grill and combined with stuffing, shaved raw sprouts, and mayonnaise enriched with the remnants of gravy. Or heat up the gravy to create a variation on the French dip. Or spend the morning poaching the carcass to create a reviving broth to have on the side with rice and the chopped-up thigh, a kind of Hainanese turkey rice. Or knead your goose fat into flour tortillas, repurposing your shredded turkey into a mole. Or somehow incorporate “all the trimmings” into a pasta dish that would make an Italian grandmother cry. If the Christmas dinner is about who we are as a nation, then the Boxing Day snack is about who we are as humans. And, pandemic or not, who we are is eating cold, fudgy potatoes straight out of the roasting tin and dipped into gravy jelly for breakfast. Jonathan Nunn is a food writer based in London. He edits the food newsletter Vittles