This Christmas, will I finally find a way to stop my gluttony getting the better of me?

The introduction to a book I picked up for the first time this week combines two of my favourite things: Agatha Christie, and Christmas dinner.

Midwinter Murder is a collection of the detective writer’s short stories, all with a wintry theme, and several of course set at Christmas. By way of a prologue, the collection begins with an autobiographical account of Christie’s own childhood Christmases, which after her father’s death in 1901 were spent in Cheshire, with the extended family of her sister’s husband, James Watts.

Christmas Day at the Victorian Gothic Abney Hall, was evidently a gluttonous affair. Lunch was served at two o’clock, after church and presents had been ticked off, and began with oyster soup, followed by turbot. Next came the main course, consisting of boiled turkey, roast turkey and a large roast sirloin of beef. Adults at the table generally confined themselves to just one meat, but Christie recounts how she, a slight girl of 12 or 13, began with the roast turkey, then moved onto the boiled version, before finishing with “four or five slashing slices of sirloin”.

As if that were not enough, next came plum pudding, mince pies and trifle; then oranges, grapes, plums and preserved fruits. “Various handfuls of chocolates” dominated the remainder of the afternoon. Yet Christie, in her recollection of those extraordinary occasions, recalls no feelings of sickness, no biliousness, and concludes that “in those days, everyone seemed to have a pretty good stomach”.

I am, I confess, often a very greedy person where food is concerned. I was, like Christie, a scrawny child and yet ate like a horse. Indeed, I would happily have eaten horse, if decently cooked and served up with chips. In my early teenage years, takeaway curry was my particular weakness: my dad would sometimes arrive home with one on a Friday evening and he, my brother and I would then engage in a kind of scramble to pile our plates as high as was physically possible, much to our mother’s dismay. At university, I would regularly pop out for a final meal of the day at about midnight: usually a doner kebab with chips and garlic sauce from the van on the high street.

But Christmas is where my gluttonous instincts are most at home, even if my festive feasts are not quite a match for Christie’s. I have only once, for instance, produced a Christmas table with multiple meats (a chicken and a duck). Generally, one bird will do the trick: ideally a goose, which when cooked well has no match, alternatively, a capon (my parents’ favourite), or a turkey if needs must. As for trimmings, sausages and stuffings are critical, roast potatoes must be numerous and accompanied by parsnips, while sprouts are a fundamental part of the whole shebang. Essentially, the more extras, the better.

Almost inevitably, I will overdo it, although I will also have one eye on the cold leftovers, which will bring just as much pleasure over the following days. Unlike Christie, I can’t honestly say that I have never felt a bit sick after Christmas lunch – certainly I have eaten to the point where I can simply eat no more, not even the most wafer thin of wafer-thin mints. But give it a few hours rest, and the contents of the fridge might begin to feel inviting.

Oddly, when it comes to Agatha Christie’s most famous characters, neither is the glutton that their creator had been as a child. Hercule Poirot was a gourmand, and a lover of hot chocolate; yet he was a fusspot too, and worried about the irritative effects of over-eating. Miss Marple, meanwhile, tended to eat functionally, and modestly. Perhaps they each provide models I should seek to emulate.

Then again, when a dish of little pigs in blankets appears before me at Christmas, I find it hard to hold back. First there may seem plenty. Then there were none.