Festive sandwiches, bath bombs and other seasonal traditions

In my hand I hold a bath bomb. It is pink and rough, unglazed, its colour and consistency reminiscent of eczema, its smell that of 15 girls entering a limo. If I drop it into the water, which is running hotly in the room next door, it will dissolve into a million sharp grains, infecting the bath with a misty pinkness, like a nostalgic effect on a VHS camera. This bomb, a Christmas gift from a forgotten family member, has travelled with me at the bottom of a washbag through three house moves, and today is the day I will finally allow it to fulfil its wet destiny.

I bathe seasonally, when the weather turns. There are two ways to measure the beginning of winter – one is to look out of the window in the morning and gauge the frost levels on a neighbour’s windscreen, the other is to walk down the high street to monitor festive limited editions.

Christmas sandwiches creep in like unwelcome uncles, their sweet innards revealing surprise cherries and macarons and ham. They present often as cold Boxing Day nightmares, breaded. The best are bold in their ambition, the brand’s most radical creatives having been locked in a boardroom since February brainstorming combinations of flavours that will not just say “Christmas”, but leave the taste of it lingering gassily in the customer’s subconscious for the next two months. Like cuckoos at the beginning of spring, winter comes when the high street unveils its sprout sandwiches.

This is the 22nd year of Starbucks’ “red cups”, they appear on the pavement like lesions, a warning of a cruel winter rounding the corner. While the sandwiches reach for memories of Christmas dinners, cousins gathered, drunken leftovers, the red cups lean into seasonal consumption – the long tradition of spending cash in a hurry on useless baubles for bitter relatives, but replaced with a gift for oneself, if only a very big coffee.

Once, in childhood, winter meant Christmas holidays, and family, and the proto-erotic thrill of a snowball fight – as adults, we attempt to reclaim that excitement by spending £3.99 on something cinnamon-scented. These products have elbowed their way into a small pen of winter traditions, the annual equivalent of flicking an elastic band on your wrist, a calming, a groundedness. The reassurance being, “Time passes, but everything stays the same.”

And when winter has announced itself, I run my bath. I live in a house of regular bathers, for whom there is no ritual surrounding its execution or enjoyment. One housemate listens to podcasts while washing his armpits, a gravelly cynic asking old actors about their childhoods, another produces short performances of Frozen while fighting over shampoo.

Me, I savour these rare exquisite evenings, when autumn has succumbed to mulch and the crisp winter air is not yet annoying. When we still step outside in the morning delighted at the prospect of snow, and when my only remaining guilty pleasure – a full house of central heating – is realised. I say things like, “We should make more soup,” and “I love you so I’ve bought you fleece slippers,” and so ease myself into these dark evenings with promises of comfort. Which includes the bath.

All must be perfect. A clean dressing gown, a well-worn towel so as not to get fluff everywhere, nothing worse, a scalding temperature and locked door. I will permit a twist, such as lavender oil, or this vintage bath bomb, and I will ease myself in as if succumbing to anaesthetic, counting down from five. The bomb fizzes angrily by my thigh, quickly transitioning into a sort of perfumed cob roll, which I prod, disheartened. And it’s at this point, in my annual winter bath, that I remember why I don’t bathe more often. Four minutes of relaxation, of submersion in sweet heat and foaming glory, and the bath is cold. Five minutes and you realise there’s no efficient way of washing your hair. Six, and you’re lying naked in a tepid soup of gravelly soap wondering when your knees got old.

The bath bomb refuses to detonate, bouncing morosely instead across the enamel, searching for someone that appreciates its smell, which now fills the room in a steam of lipgloss and plastic. The realisation falls on me like a loaded “Oh.”

This is what winter is, not the cosy fireside chats nor crisp walks down snowy paths, but four months of discomfort, disappointment and sentiment failing to catch up with reality. It is chasing warmth down ever-darkening passages, it is frantic online purchases to placate children stuck inside due to rain. It is factory-made smells, designed to recreate weekends once glimpsed on TV, stuffed into candles as if ducks into turkeys. It is this bath, this dimly lit bath barely concealing my goose pimples and shame.

So tomorrow I must erase these realisations from my mind, gorging on seasonal sandwiches and a coffee made of cream. Because the lie that winter is something to be welcomed, savoured and ritualised, is the most ingrained tradition we have.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman