On her last Christmas, my mother performed a miracle. She produced a Christmas dinner for 14 people on an ancient anthracite stove in the kitchen of the farmhouse I'd recently moved to.
The stove was a blue-enamelled Esse. It was fuelled each day by two scuttle-loads of anthracite, one in the morning, one in the evening. It had to be vigorously stoked and voided of spent coals before the fresh fuel could be poured with a raucous clatter into the burner.
The stove was not only our cooking hub — it also heated water for the kitchen and bathroom.
We weren't farming types. Our new home — necessitated by my husband's job on a nearby nickel mine — was a novelty for us all. It was a sprawling, century-old homestead set in a beautiful valley 250 km east of our hometown. Its front garden was planted with trees whose initials spelled PEACE: pine, elm, ash, cedar, elm.
It went without saying that Christmas would be held at ours' that year — the first my husband and I had ever hosted. But how to produce the usual festive fare on this lovely but anachronistic stove?
The week before Christmas my mother rang me on the farmhouse's party line (the stove wasn't the only archaism we had to contend with) and asked me to measure the oven's dimensions. She took the measurements to a homewares shop and bought two roasting pans that fit the space snugly.
On Christmas Eve she arrived on my doorstep with roasting pans, Christmas pudding, turkey, ham, gifts, two grandmothers and my father in tow.
The electricity had tripped — a regular occurrence on the farm, especially when it thundered. We lit candles and lanterns, waited for other family members to arrive, and held a cheese and wine soiree there in the gloaming.
Then my mother got down to business, setting up a cooking station on the bench alongside the Esse, laying out knives and peelers and graters, assessing my woeful collection of serving platters, calculating how long it would take to roast the turkey and glaze the ham, wondering how to keep the mounds of potatoes and pumpkin hot, the way she liked it.
She set up the hot tray she'd brought with her, and hoped that by morning the electricity would be restored so she could plug it into a live socket; it was rude, she felt, to serve dinner on unheated plates.
On Christmas morning,