In 2020, I duly ranked every festive food I could think of (#8: Marshmallow Santas - Easter, with a face; #5: Jersey Bennes - the most glorious thing to come out of the ground since the Resurrection). Four years later, I have regrets.
Back then, for example, I scored Christmas pudding more favourably than candy canes, turducken and carrots (a reindeer cannot fly on beer and cake alone). This was a clear error of judgement.
To make a Christmas pudding, you must spend a week’s wages on several sacks of dried fruit that you steam in a kitchen already dripping with humidity and the sweat of domestic labour. After about four days, you will have produced a dessert that requires another dessert to complete it.
Christmas pudding (and custard) is obviously the worst Christmas food ever and not just because the only person who actually eats it is an ageing relative whose sole contribution to the table will be a box of scorched almonds and a lecture on the merits of David Seymour as the country’s next deputy prime minister.
To be honest, it’s the scorched almond ranking I most regret. In 2020, when I made it my number one festive food, it represented something intrinsic to the spirit of that terrible year. Scorched almonds are gifted, not bought. They are a thank you present, an act of compassion and goodwill - the sort of thing you buy for teachers, nurses and neighbours who left frozen soup on your doorstep in your hours of self-isolating need.
We’re not like that anymore.
Scorched almonds speak to kinder times when politicians didn’t hate on quinoa, sushi or the South Taranaki Bight. The modern world is fast-tracked, boot-camped and butter chicken’ed. It is selfish, entitled and entirely undeserving of 240g of chocolate-coated nuts.
In 2024, the best festive comestible embraces the prevailing ethos: Everybody for themselves. You snooze, you lose and by that I mean you get the chocolate wheaten. Elbows out, fastest foot forward - top spot in this year’s Festive Food Power Ranking is the Griffin’s Sampler Box.
Can you taste the nostalgia? Are childhood memories of “one fancy, one plain” cascading like warm, gentle waves? Clearly you have not recently acquainted yourself with the contents of said Sampler.
In 1930, the Griffin’s Sampler box was advertised as “a new and better way of saying ‘assorted biscuits’.” You could be sure of quality“ and a total variety of 19 different kinds,” proclaimed the Nelson Evening Mail.
Wait. In 1933, there was literally even more: “You now get 24 different kinds in every package,” said the advertisement in the Evening Post that listed every biscuit (even the problematic ones) by name.
Cream sandwich. Chocolate Wheaten. Wheaten Cream. Creamy Tea. Chocolate Butter Nut. Cremelet. Coconut Finger. Butter Nut. Eton Wafer. Lemon Snap. Cocoanut Gem. Empress. Chocolate Mallow Cream. Ripple. Nice. Shortbread Cream. Butter Finger. Pearl Cream. Shortcake. Chocolate African. Custodian. Iced Wafer. Butter Cream. Chocolate Finger.
Can you guess how many biscuits in the modern Griffin’s Sampler?
Choc Thins. Hundreds & Thousands. Chit Chats. Pink Wafers. Butter Shortbreads. Toffee Pops. Dark Chocolate Wheatens. Chocolate Cookies. Krispies.
Nine decades later the country’s favourite biscuit box contains a mere nine species (none of which are Cameo Cremes or Mint Treats).
They say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Nothing says 2025 like this box of diminished returns.
