Chapter 24 • Christmas
Polyxeni, perhaps out of guilt that she would be taking Mr Dorides away from his son during the Christmas holidays, or perhaps because she wanted to show - but to whom? - that she wasn’t just a socialite but a housewife, tried to create a Christmas atmosphere in the house. She brought out the old artificial Christmas tree from the store room, bought new decorations, opened the Tselemente cookbook and found recipes for kourambiedes and melomakarona, which she baked with Phrossou’s help, made a pudding from a recipe she had kept from when she had lived in England, and even bought crackers from a shop which sold English goods.
The result was variegated, partly Greek and partly English, as urban life tended to be at any rate in the island colony. Mr Dorides was amused
