All I want for Christmas is … the Nairn Museum potato flask. Showcased as part of the Highland museum’s virtual Advent calendar on Instagram last week, it’s a late-18th-century Staffordshire pottery flask – to be filled with strong drink and used to toast a safe journey for a traveller – shaped like a very realistic, knobbly spud, complete with green bits. The benefactor who donated the flask apparently explained it was so ugly that no one in his family wanted to inherit it.
More than 15,000 Instagram likers beg to differ, including me: I desperately covet this beauteous and useful tuber, surely the ideal emotional support accessory for the season’s more trying social engagements. As the museum’s representative explains, the potato was “seen as a very fashionable vegetable” back then, and I think we need to think hard about that: why isn’t it now? It might be the most valuable player on the Christmas dining table (don’t even think about arguing), but it’s cruelly taken for granted. Have we ever considered the potato as a gift, an aesthetic, a mood?
How hard would it be to make a replica potato flask? What is capitalism for if it can’t provide me with this?
I’ve checked the craft site Etsy but no one seems to have fully exploited the potato’s potential as a creative muse, which is disappointing (I was tempted by a potato calendar, though – 12 stunning photos of spuds). How hard would it be to make a replica potato flask, ceramicists? What is capitalism for if it can’t provide me with this?
Thwarted, I’ve come up with another idea: why don’t we add “viral potato bed” to our Christmas wishlists? A recent TikTok trend, the potato bed is an upside-down fitted sheet, its elasticated edges bolstered with pillows to make walls much like a baked-potato skin, the base filled with blankets and duvets. You put yourself in – making you the cheesy beans or tuna mayo, I suppose – then top it off with another duvet, creating a cosy single-occupancy nest.
It sounds like a heavenly holiday project, either as a gift to yourself, or for a loved one. I can wish you no greater happiness for this season than to spend it recumbent in your potato bed, eating crisps washed down with something potent from a potato flask.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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