The festive season brings many sacred traditions: arguing about whether 'Die Hard' is a Christmas film, pretending to like your aunt's bone-dry turkey, and watching the Doctor Who special through a food-induced haze. But nobody – and we mean nobody – does Christmas quite like Sea Girls' Oli Khan, a man whose approach to seasonal consumption makes Henry VIII look like he was just picking at his food.
You might think you know how to do Christmas Day. You probably have a schedule, handed down through generations like a particularly well-worn party hat. But Khan's minute-by-minute documentation of his yuletide feasting reads less like a diary and more like a challenge to the very concepts of time, space, and human digestive capacity. From a breakfast that would make Pete Doherty's Margate morning feast look like a light snack to an evening performance worthy of an Olympic medal in leftover navigation, this is Christmas Day elevated to an art form.
The star of this particular nativity isn't a baby in a manger – it's every morsel of food and adult fizzy pop within a five-mile radius of Khan's kitchen, each one destined to play its part in this epic tale of festive consumption. And like all the best Christmas stories, it starts with someone going back to bed.
7:00am → Wake up.
7:05am → Remember I'm not 5, and go back to sleep.
10:00am → Breakfast. I'm talking the biggest breakfast you've ever seen; Pete Doherty taking on the breakfast mountain in Margate. By the end, I'm 50% sausage and eggs, and every cell in my body is begging me to stop.
10:05am → We crack open the Christmas chocolates. Chocolate coins, tiny little chocolate Santas, giant chocolate Santas, chocolate snowballs, a thousand Lindt balls and a chocolate Mini Cooper my aunt got me because I said they were 'kind of cool' when I was 8.
10:30am → Black coffee; milk is wasted calories today.
10:35am → I pass out for two hours.
12:35pm → I jolt awake. The slightest hint of Christmas dinner cooking has acted as smelling salts. My nervous system, now thronging with activity, demands snacks. Crisps, nuts, pretzels, olives, more crisps, cheese straws, breadsticks and an industrial-sized tub of Jacobs Treeselets. A dusty bag of chestnuts sits in the corner, ready to be returned to the cupboard for another year.
1:00pm → Port.
1:20pm → Sherry.
1:40pm → Baileys.
2:00pm → Amaretto.
2:20pm → Gin and Tonic.
2:40pm → A weird canned cocktail that had fallen to the back of the fridge.
3:00pm → The finest wines available to humanity (Kylie rosé).
4:00pm → Christmas dinner. A turkey the size of an ostrich, a small farm's worth of potatoes, seven thousand pigs in blankets. Sprouts rain down on me like a monsoon. I bathe in gravy.
4:30pm → Christmas pudding.
5:00pm → Any chocolate that escaped my earlier wrath is promptly dispatched.
6:00pm → I enter the kitchen for seconds, receiving a hero's welcome from every carrot, parsnip and sprout in sight. This is my Olympic Games; I am in peak form. The gods smile on me.
7:00pm → I crawl to the sofa to watch whatever Christmas slop has fallen out of copyright this year.
8:00pm → Bed.
Taken from the December 2024 / January 2025 issue of Dork.
