Christmas at Eynon's
What can you expect at Eynon's at Christmas time?
Below is a collection of photos from last year, then to give you an idea of the atmosphere, we have included an article from the Daily Mail when they visited the shop.
Daily Mail Article
Light pouring out of the shop window fell on the cold, white faces of all the people out there on the pavement stamping their feet for warmth. This was at 8am and here, in West Wales, you still needed another hour for dawn to show if snow had fallen on the mountains in the night.
Huw Eynon put down the last cup of tea he would have for many hours. Rhiannon, his wife, looked at the clock and waited for 8am. The time had to be perfect. Like the countdown for a space launch. It was a ritual in the trade. Then one of the girls opened the door and war begun.
The war was everywhere in Britain and called ‘collecting the turkey day’.
Eynon’s famous butchers, in St. Clears, became a place of madness. Similarly in 10,000 butcher’s
shops elsewhere.
Turkeyday is a battle and is always two or three days before Christmas. If it had to be organised properly, it would take General Eisenhower to come back from beyond.
So nearly like it was in 1860 when the family first opened, Eynon’s let everyone in from the icy morning gloom to the dazzling shop Huw had created and owed something to Hollywood.
‘When I refurbished, I didn’t want two acres of white tiles,’ he said, peeping out from one of the work rooms. I told the architect I wanted mahogany and papered walls,’ He got it. It was unlike any other butcher’s seen before.
Yesterday he didn’t know how many hundreds of turkeys would go out, or lamb or beef from the 50 cattle prepared and stacked in one of the vast cold stores. All he knew was that he would be ‘totally knackered’.
So the people came in from the village’s one main street and made an arrowhead into the Eynon’s front door. Ten counter staff carried the boxed ‘Copas’ turkeys, held high. Names of the customers were marked on the side. Plenty of Evanses and Joneses.
Dylan Thomas wrote of these parts. It is Under Milk Wood country. He put Huw’s grandfather, Carl Eynon, in his play and called him Butcher Beynon.
People kept coming in from the street. ‘How are you Mrs Thomas?’ or ‘Good morning, Mrs Jones.’
There was mayhem. The same in Lancashire and Surrey and all over, when women decide it’s time for Christmas to begin.
Now there was ‘Mr. Inspiration’, who is straight from Dylan. Sophie, the salesgirl with a wonderful smile, gave him the name because he was always in the shop saying: ‘I’m looking for inspiration.’
When the A40, the road to Charing Cross, London, went right past the front door, drivers stopped and shopped for chops and pies and it was known for there to be a traffic jam for half a mile back.
The fast road goes another way now, so yesterday cars were parked right outside again and backed up for 100 yards.
This is a murderous day......Huw agreed! He hadn’t slept much and was at his shop by 6.30am.
‘Christmas is a massive logistical challenge,’ is what he thought about it, and said so without a pause. The answer made him seem like a well controlled kind of a guy.
‘Do you lose your temper?
He didn’t get a chance to answer this time. There was a hallelujah chorus of ‘yes’, even from rooms you couldn’t see! Huw smiled shyly. ‘Well, maybe now and again,’ is how he said he would have replied, given the chance.
‘I’ll tell you seriously what you’ve got to be careful about, and that’s not upsetting a customer. Upset one at Christmas and you’ve lost them for the rest of the year. Christmas is a great study in human nature.’
Nobody rolled a drum or blew a trumpet. But right now Huw Eynon, his knives laid out on a marble slab like a surgeon, began to work on his great creation.
Borrowed from the French court of Versailles, but here in West Wales it was definitely all his own.
He pulled over a Copas free range bronze turkey and boned it until he could open it up like a butterfly.
One of the girls put down a Gressingham duck and Huw boned that one clean. He laid the duck inside the turkey.
Then he grabbed a brace of guinea fowl, and boned them, stuffed them with apple and apricot, and put both inside the duck.
This was building up in front of you layer on layer. So much meat it seemed you would eat off it for ever.
‘Now for the core,’ Huw said reaching for a brace of pheasants. He called the whole thing ‘a masterpiece’ in his brochure. Dylan would have gone with that. The pheasants were on top of the guinea fowl. It was colossal. Huw folded the turkey over the duck and guinea fowl and pheasants, and tied it up. It looked like a whole turkey again and weighed about 22lbs.
‘The Baronial Banquet, I call it.’
That is some creation, he was told.
‘Feeds 15 to 20 people and cooks for about seven and a half hours. You cut it like a loaf of bread, straight down, not around the sides.’
You could order one for £125.
The combination of birds will change annually, next year the flavours will change again.
Which all went on in Eynon’s of St.Clears, with many national awards hanging on the walls.
‘It’s a lunatic day’ Huw said.
But you love it.
‘I do really,.’
Happy Christmas, then.
‘And to everyone,’ Huw said.
John Edwards.
Daily Mail, Wednesday, December 22 2004