January is always a great time of year for picking up a few bargains in the supermarkets as they try to clear the shelves of the Christmas items they weren't able to shift. Now is the time to pick up excess boxes of mince pies for 50p or less (as long as you don't mind eating them well after the Christmas decorations have come down), or stock up ahead of next Christmas on things like mincemeat, marzipan and Christmas puddings, which might have Best Before dates during the summer, but will definitely still be fine come December.
You can also tell which of the weird and wonderful special edition Christmas foodstuffs failed to excite shoppers - last year, my local Sainsbury's was still trying to get rid of jars their own-brand Black Forest Mincemeat well into February, which were refusing to shift despite being reduced to just 20 pence a jar. I can't say that mincemeat with added chocolate appeals to me, so I didn't buy it even at that price. It looks like Tesco's Peanuts with a Pigs in Blankets-flavoured crunchy coating, and M&S's Turkey Gravy Mayonnaise are among the more unappetising items following suit this year.
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| Was £2.10, now 53p...but there's a lot to shift so there may well be further reductions |
I suppose some of these limited edition products must be enjoyed by some, but you do have to wonder whether some of these flavour combinations have been dreamt up by teams who are either drunk, stoned, or just experiencing a massive sugar-rush from consuming all the leftover products from last year. Do they really think these creations are going to fly off the shelves before Christmas, when they are still at full price?
It's nice to see that this sort of thing isn't just a British eccentricity; in the USA, there seems to be the same, if not greater enthusiasm for special Christmas editions. One particular limited edition product brought to my attention towards the end of 2022 was SPAM Figgy Pudding. This was not, you may be glad to hear, a Christmas pudding with SPAM in it, but rather tins of the famous pink meat, flavoured with "a blend of warm spices and seasonal ingredients that will be the star in many wintertime recipe favorites", which I think sounds marginally better, but not by much. It was, apparently, "born of a desire to reconnect diners with fond recollections of the days of Christmas yore", evoking "a sense of nostalgia and warmth", all of which sounds like complete and utter nonsense to me.
