Paper Bags and Cold Hands: A Christmas Market Day on a Worcester Stall

Rachel has worked the last market before Christmas for eleven years. She sells mixed local produce — vegetables, preserves, a few bakes — from a double stall in Angel Place, and she has the day down to a rhythm that hasn't really changed since her mother had a pitch on the same cobbles. What follows is her account of how that day goes, from the pre-dawn van load to the last paper bag. It is a rehearsal for Wednesday 23 December, and a pretty accurate picture of what Worcester's Christmas table actually looks like.

4.40am: The van, the list, the frost

The van is loaded the night before, mostly. Sprouts are the exception — they go in last thing, in the cold box, because a sprout that spends a night sweating in a warm van is a sprout nobody wants. Rachel works out of a unit on the edge of St John's, and the drive in takes eleven minutes if the lights are kind. It is the only eleven minutes of the day she gets to herself.

The list is taped to the inside of the windscreen, and it is less about stock than about people. Six bags of Maris Pipers for the Duggans. Two dozen mince pies for the woman from Battenhall who rings ahead every year. A box of the hot smoked ham from the man near Upton who only does Christmas trade. Pre-orders are the quiet backbone of the whole thing.

6.15am: Setting up, and the choreography of a cold morning

By half six the stall is up and the lights are on, and the market has that particular Christmas noise — crates going down, a van door, someone laughing at something that isn't funny yet. Rachel lays the stall out in a deliberate order. Heavy things at the back. Anything green at eye level. Preserves and chutneys to the right, near the till, because people buy them while they're waiting to pay and that's a fact of retail nobody argues with.

The first customer of the day is always a trader. Someone from the coffee van, or the cheese stall two along, buying carrots and apologising for it.

9.30am: The peak, and what Worcester actually buys

Between half nine and half eleven, the market belongs to people with a list and a car park ticket ticking down. This is when the numbers get interesting.

Sprouts, obviously. Rachel brings around forty kilos of them, grown down in the Vale of Evesham, and most of them leave in one-and-two-kilo bags. Parsnips go almost as fast. Carrots are steady. Potatoes are the great unsung purchase of Christmas — people buy them in quantities that suggest a household of nine, and then explain, unprompted, that they've got people over.

What surprises people is what doesn't sell. The beautiful purple-sprouting broccoli? Slow. Artichokes? A curiosity. The expensive little jars of chutney that took three days to make? They sell on the last day, but only after eleven o'clock, and only to people who've already bought everything else. Christmas shopping is not adventurous shopping. Rachel has made her peace with that.

"People come to the Christmas market for the familiar," she says. "They want the thing they had last year. My job is to have it, and to have enough of it, and to not try and be clever about it."

1pm: The lull, and what a trader can read from a queue

The middle of the day goes quiet, and that's when the reading happens. Rachel reckons she can tell more about Worcester's Christmas from a December queue than from a whole year of Sundays.

This year's read, as she sees it: smaller birds, more veg, more people buying for two or three rather than eight. More cash than you'd expect. Fewer people leaving it to the absolute last minute and more people pre-ordering a fortnight ahead — a hangover, she thinks, from the years when nobody was sure what would be open.

And a change she likes: more questions. Where's this from, who grew it, is it local. "Five years ago I'd get that twice a day. Now it's twenty times. It's the best thing that's happened to this market."

3pm: Discounting, and the diplomacy of leftovers

By three the light has gone flat and the serious trading is done. This is the hour of quiet negotiations. A bag of sprouts knocked down for someone doing their shop late. A box of clementines pressed on the coffee trader. Two mince pies for a pound, and the last of the stollen going to whoever looks coldest.

What gets left behind is remarkably consistent. The big bags of sprouts — people buy small, always. The gluten-free mince pies, which Rachel now brings six of instead of twenty-four. The celeriac, which she keeps bringing and which keeps coming home. The fancy chutney. Always the fancy chutney.

"You learn not to take it personally," she says. "But you also learn to stop ordering it."

4.30pm: The last mince pie

Pack-down takes forty minutes and is done in near silence. Crates, boards, the till bag, the light strips coiled up. The last mince pie — there's always one — gets eaten by Rachel in the van before she pulls out, sitting in the cold with the heater on full.

Then it's back through the city, past the cathedral and the last of the shoppers, and home to a fridge that is, ironically, almost empty. She'll do her own Christmas shop on the 24th, from someone else's stall, and pay full price, and be glad to.

"That's the thing about this market," she says. "You spend December selling everyone else their Christmas. It's a good job. But you do notice that the people you're selling to are the same people you'll be stood next to in a queue on Christmas Eve."

The final food market before Christmas runs in Angel Place on Wednesday 23 December. Get there before eleven if you want the sprouts.