IT was during the great post-Christmas/millennium clearout that I found it, wedged behind a pile of stacked plates in a kitchen cupboard.

"Is this yours?" I asked my brother, who's been staying with me during all the recent holly-jollity.

He admitted it was.

'It looks like it's been hidden,' I said. He admitted it had.

'It' was a great chunk of Christmas cake.

Every year The Mother buys a nice, big cake. And every Easter it's still there, unloved and uneaten.

My father, who died almost three years ago, liked a slice of Christmas cake with a piece of cheese and an apple, Yorkshire style, but the rest of us could never stand it, including The Mother (actually a Battenburg woman).

Unfortunately, she can't break the habit of buying these heavyweight fruitcakes every Christmas and offering slices of them to any male who comes within range. Women are not similarly propositioned so obviously fruitcake, in her eyes, is Men's Food.

I'm as bad. I hate Christmas pudding, I always have, I always will. But again, my father was partial to a portion - or two or three if he really got lucky - and the habit of buying one has stuck.

Sometimes we steam it, sometimes we stick it in the microwave (oh, culinary decadence) but it always comes out the same, a lumpen, unappetising, indigestible mess. Quick, smother it with brandy sauce, for pity's sake!

The Mother and I also buy and make large quantities of mince pies, boring, stodgy mince pies which we inflict on each other in an effort to be rid of them. "Go on, you have one of mine and I'll have one of yours . . ."

And, despite being almost-vegetarian (well, chicken and fish don't really count, do they?) we buy lots of meat - beef, pork and pork pies, ham, sausages, turkeys.

We roast it, grill it, fry it, conceal it in curries and casseroles, yet there's always more to come, some frozen hunk lurking at the bottom of the freezer.

"We've still got that pork to eat," The Mother said to me wearily on New Year's Day. She wasn't referring to anything we'd bought for this Christmas/New Year but a piece of pig, now entombed in a solid block of ice, which we acquired in 1998.

But it was only after the discovery of the 'hidden' Christmas cake that I realised some serious talking needed to be done.

"Look," I told The Mother, "we've got to change, we've got to stop being so wasteful. Next Christmas we'll jettison the fruit cakes, the mince pies and pudding. We'll have a lovely lightweight Victoria sponge instead, and a fresh fruit salad, and a cheesecake . . . "

"It won't really seem like Christmas then," The Mother sighed. "But you're right, of course."

Good, I thought, that's one problem finally solved.

On Monday, when the shops opened their doors again, The Mother was off to the supermarket to get some bread. It's the essentials we always run out of, even though there's an untouched ginger cake in the kitchen.

She returned triumphant. 'Look what they had on offer, only 49p for a box of six,' she said. 'What a bargain! I got you a box, too.'

Mince pie anybody?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.