How to celebrate Christmas at the ends of the earth

Christmas Day, 1892. In a lonely snow-whipped yurt high in the Pamir Mountains, Charles Adolphus Murray, the seventh Earl of Dunmore, did not let an outside temperature of -40C, or a lack of suet, dampen his desire for Christmas pudding.

Murray used his telescope as a rolling pin, making a “roly-poly” Christmas pudding with ingenious, if somewhat unorthodox, ingredients: “frozen yolks of six Kashgar eggs, Kirghiz flour . . . and butter from a tin of Sardines au Beurre”, mixed with locally sourced pistachios, apricots and honey.

So delighted was he with the result that he exclaimed no cook in Europe, on that very day, “could have been as proud of his Christmas Pudding as I was of mine . . . notwithstanding the slight suspicion of a flavour of sardines”. It was, as he mildly put it, a “new departure in Christmas Puddings”.

Murray’s pleasure in improvising a quintessential dish in the middle of nowhere is partly in saluting a well-trodden seasonal ceremony. It wasn’t strictly necessary — he had other means of sustaining himself — but the meaning of rituals often comes from bestowing time and effort on the inessential. Like the expedition itself, the pudding was ambitious, risky and ultimately rewarding.

We may complain about this season’s commercial blackmail, kitchen trials and enforced jollity. But the chance to bring everyone together, the rare window of time set aside for celebration and the comforts of glossy ham, goose and leftovers are potent counterpoints to the cold, dark days of winter. Whether we admit it or not, many of us are lost without such seasonal way points. For those who find themselves spending December 25 in the wilderness, whether at sea, up a mountain or in a desert, the craving for yuletide cheer is often acutely felt.

Murray wrote about his Pamiri pudding in a two-volume book of his travels, The Pamirs, published in London in 1893. His choice of dish reflected the fact that Victorians gave Christmas puddings top billing at festive tables. The Illustrated London News, in 1850, described it as “a national symbol”, adding: “it does not represent a class or caste, but the bulk of the English nation. There is not a man, woman or child . . . that does not expect a taste of plum pudding of some sort or another on Christmas Day.” And although the old English method for making Christmas pudding is notoriously laborious, one understands why the seventh Earl of Dunmore was so determined to make one.

How do explorers today observe Christmas in remote places? Of course, they’re able to travel lighter than their forerunners. Meals are dehydrated rather than preserved; isotonic gels, weighing next to nothing, offer a quick carb hit, and high-tech equipment makes comfort (and survival) less of a burden. But obstacles remain when attempting to celebrate far from home.

Polar explorer Felicity Aston has spent three Christmases on an Antarctic research station, and another three in a tent “somewhere” on that continent. In 2012, she became the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica, a journey of 1,084 miles that took 59 days to complete. Without help from kites or machines, and suffering, at times, from extreme loneliness, her one luxury was a tub of peanut butter. When it froze solid, she rationed it to just one spoonful a day to make it last, scooped from the jar like ice cream. As she puts it, “Everything tastes great when you have such little to work with.”

Like Murray’s expedition itself, the pudding was ambitious, risky and ultimately rewarding

Aston has her own version of the Earl of Dunmore’s make-do plum pudding. One Christmas, she was on a small Antarctic outpost on an island the size of Wales, a two-hour flight from the main research base, with just one other person. “We spent the day trying to create delicacies from the store of mostly dried and canned goods we had available, with varying success. I remember we ended up with a blonde-looking Christmas pudding.”

Last month, Dwayne Fields, the first black Briton to walk more than 400 nautical miles to the magnetic North Pole, set off for Antarctica with his teammate Phoebe Smith and 10 British youngsters under the age of 16. Their adventure was organised by the #WeTwo Foundation, set up by Fields and Smith in 2019 to offer children from underprivileged backgrounds the chance to embark upon life-changing experiences, and to confront the lack of diversity in the field of exploration, which tends to be male, white, ex-military and upper middle class.

As part of their initial fundraising, the pair undertook an Antarctic-style excursion in the UK during the winter of 2019. They walked the length of mainland Britain, pulling their kit behind them in wheeled sleds. It meant 40 nights of wild camping in foul weather, including over Christmas. “That winter walk was as hard as any expedition I’ve been on,” says Fields. “Sometimes we walked the equivalent of a marathon in a day and it was always damp and cold. But the toughest part was knowing that sometimes there was a Starbucks just a 10-minute walk away. That and the fact that people kept offering us a lift in their cars.”

Phoebe Smith vividly remembers waking up on Christmas Day camped atop Glastonbury Tor. “We awoke to druids chanting and burning incense.” Although they were short on food, with all the shops closed, gifts were exchanged, including a chocolate bar and a Star Wars figurine. “The spirit of Christmas was definitely there,” Fields says.

The equipment that travellers carry is telling not only of the climate, terrain and era in which they explore, but also of their standing and temperament. It is the subject of a recent book, Expeditions Unpacked: What the Great Explorers Took into the Unknown, by Ed Stafford, a former British Army captain and survival expert who holds a Guinness World Record as the first person to walk the Amazon river. In his book, Stafford profiles the merchant navy officer Robin Knox-Johnston, who set off in his 32ft ketch (a sailboat with two masts), in the summer of 1968. He hoped to become the first person to sail single-handed and nonstop around the world, as part of the Golden Globe race.

Knox-Johnston loaded up his boat, built of Indian teak and named Suhaili, with a tonne of tinned food and a few epicurean treats from home including Cadbury’s chocolate, Bovril, Smash instant potato and 120 cans of donated Tennent’s Lager. As final preparations were made at Falmouth Harbour, the boat sat noticeably low and heavy-laden in the water.

By the time Christmas Day came around, Knox-Johnston had survived fixing a leak in the water (while shooting dead a circling shark with his Lee-Enfield rifle) and storms so terrible that they damaged his navigational aids and radio. In high spirits, he felt optimistic. He drank a toast to the Queen mid-afternoon, opened one of his 12 bottles of whisky and a jar of pickled onions he had stowed on board, before performing a solo carol service to the waves. (Knox-Johnston achieved his ambition, arriving back in Falmouth on April 22 1969, after 30,000 miles and 312 days at sea).

Long expeditions entirely recontextualise food because every single item has to be carefully accounted for and a lack of it can fray nerves, or worse. Those who travel by foot do not have the luxuries of cabin space or storage and instead must display the ultimate in self-control as everything must be carried. Explorers have been known to cut labels out of clothes or snap off their toothbrush handles to save on weight.

Levison Wood, a man for whom going on an expedition is almost a natural state of being, knows this all too well. He has hiked the Himalayas, a six-month journey of more than 1,700 miles from Afghanistan to Bhutan, and walked 1,800 miles through Central America from Mexico to Colombia. During these arduous adventures, there is little room for excess baggage, let alone 120 cans of beer.

As far as food is concerned, he told me, he has only one mindset before setting off. “It’s about leaving everything behind and being ready to get by on rat stew if needed.” But he does make a point of marking the day if away at Christmas. In 2013, when walking the Nile for his first big televised mission — a nine-month, 4,250-mile-long journey through rainforest, savannah, swamp, desert and delta oasis — he found himself spending December 25 on the border of Rwanda and Tanzania.

Wood was in one of the most remote places he’d ever been, in the Akagera National Park, with his main guide Boston Ndoole; his friend Will, who’d travelled out to join him for Christmas; and two other local guides. What the local guides — who were former bandits — didn’t know, was that Boston could understand their local tribal language and that he’d heard them discussing a plan. That plan was that they were going to rob Wood and Will.

Thankfully, Boston intervened, threatening to tie the rogue guides to trees and to leave them there should they attempt a hold-up. With disaster averted, the group — minus the bandits — bought a goat which then walked with them for a week, faithfully following them through the forests. The team set up camp on the banks of a crocodile-infested river. On Christmas Day, they decorated an acacia tree with baubles that they’d brought along, and Boston prepared to slaughter the goat and roast it over the fire.

The problem was they’d become quite good friends with the goat. On their long walk, they’d even gone so far as to pick up the creature and carry it when it seemed tired. “This was probably a mistake,” Wood recalls, given that the loyal creature was their intended Christmas dinner. In the name of festivities, the party had to grit their teeth and bid farewell to the animal. Like so many adventurers before them, they understood that a feast, whether an oddball pudding or roasted goat, is a Christmas gift in itself.

Caroline Eden is an author and travel writer. Her latest book is ‘Red Sands’

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